For sole reply he honored me with a meaning look. For some days he has
amused himself with teasing me at lunch; he watches me, and I
dissemble. In this way I have played with him cruelly as father and
ambassador in petto. Hadn't he taken me for a fool? He asked me what
I thought of this and that young man, and of some girls whom I had met
in several houses. I replied with quite inane remarks on the color of
their hair, their faces, and the difference in their figures. My
father seemed disappointed at my crassness, and inwardly blamed
himself for having asked me.
"Still, father," I added, "don't suppose I am saying what I really
think: mother made me afraid the other day that I had spoken more
frankly than I ought of my impressions."
"With your family you can speak quite freely," my mother replied.
"Very well, then," I went on. "The young men I have met so far strike
me as too self-centered to excite interest in others; they are much
more taken up with themselves than with their company. They can't be
accused of lack of candor at any rate. They put on a certain
expression to talk to us, and drop it again in a moment, apparently
satisfied that we don't use our eyes. The man as he converses is the
lover; silent, he is the husband. The girls, again, are so artificial
that it is impossible to know what they really are, except from the
way they dance; their figures and movements alone are not a sham. But
what has alarmed me most in this fashionable society is its brutality.
The little incidents which take place when supper is announced give
one some idea--to compare small things with great--of what a popular
rising might be. Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general
selfishness. I imagined society very different. Women count for little
in it; that may perhaps be a survival of Bonapartist ideas."
"Armande is coming on extraordinarily," said my mother.
"Mother, did you think I should never get beyond asking to see Mme. de
Stael?" My father smiled, and rose from the table. Saturday.
My dear, I have left one thing out. Here is the tidbit I have reserved
for you. The love which we pictured must be extremely well hidden; I
have seen not a trace of it. True, I have caught in drawing-rooms now
and again a quick exchange of glances, but how colorless it all is!
Love, as we imagined it, a world of wonders, of glorious dreams, of
charming realities, of sorrows that waken sympathy, and smiles that
make sunshine, does not exist. The bewitching words, the constant
interchange of happiness, the misery of absence, the flood of joy at
the presence of the beloved one--where are they? What soil produces
these radiant flowers of the soul? Which is wrong? We or the world?