Therese had already met with enough to daunt her in her little life, although it had not had that effect; she looked upon all the roughnesses of the road, so far, as things extraneous, and not altogether belonging to her existence. Whatever part of her they affected it was not her belief in the rose-coloured days that were coming. That stood unshaken. Nor while it lasted could she be said to have lost her courage; yet it had grown to have a strange admixture of timidity since she went--a bold brave child--to live at Rouen. Her heart used to swell, and her cheeks flush, when M. Moreau was harsh to her aunt, to Fabien; but her woman's nature, though it resented his treatment, quailed before it. Once or twice she had resisted him, but all the time she was terribly frightened. Poor Therese! she was only a girl, and he had every thing on his side except right, as she used to say to herself indignantly, half angry at her own weakness. Madame Moreau was a large feeble woman, who scarcely ventured to think without her husband's permission. She was so passive under his provocations that you were inclined to wonder whether she had been so from the first, or whether, after he had frightened the spirit out of her, nature had avenged herself by giving her this impervious armour. Therese's little fiery outbreaks on her behalf were always wasted. They were much more appreciated by Fabien; he incited her to them, and she was too generous to notice that she was left to bear the consequences alone. He was her hero, over whom she rang her little changes of admiration: when he told her that he loved her, instead of formally beforehand requesting her hand from her uncle, she promised, with her grey eyes shining straight into his, and all her heart in her words, never to give him up. Fabien promised the same. "Every thing," says an old writer, "has a double handle, or at least we have two hands by which to apprehend it." I suppose it was so with this promise. Then came the crash, and her hero went away, more of a hero than ever. In her thoughts Therese set a crown on his head, and turned him into one of the old champions. Fabien, who was thoroughly nineteenth-century, would have been utterly puzzled what to do with himself if her ideas had come true. And then, with her boundless store of hopefulness, of expectation, she did not find the waiting so weary as it looked. Every now and then, to be sure, there would surge up in her heart a wild longing, a yearning such as had broken out when M. Deshoulieres spoke, the days would seem interminable, the distance from Fabien infinite. Such pangs came more acutely after M. Moreau had one day called her into his room. "So you are still thinking of that ungrateful?" said the old man mockingly. "In that case you shall receive his latest news." And then he showed her Fabien's lines of renunciation.