Chapter 18

In those last autumn days, under the rain of dead leaves, they enjoyed delicious hours. Leonor lived attentively, taking care that no single word of his might shock the young girl. Rose, her eyes always sad, answered with cordial politeness. Their words were measured, insignificant, but they were uttered in a voice full of a secret emotion.

They directed the alterations together, giving no orders without consulting one another; and they were soon agreed about everything, for their only desire was to stand together looking at the workmen. They confined themselves to cutting a few useful paths, transplanting a few bushes and arranging the lawns and flower-beds.

The decisive gestures in life are almost always the simplest, the most ingenuous. Discovering a few sprigs of violet under a wall, picking them, offering them to her: that was the act which won for Leonor his first smile from the girl, a smile that was still vague, a smile in which the soul, so long solicited, showed itself for an instant, as though at a window visited at last by the sun.

One day, while they were holding a lilac that was being transplanted, their hands met. Rose withdrew hers without affectation, but a little later she approached it once more and perhaps that tree, as it was wrenched from the earth, felt a thrill of love passing through its sleeping trunk.

Leonor thought of nothing but the charm of his present life; he analysed himself no more; he made no plots or projects; he breathed pure air, he was opening out.

Though less wretched, Rose still suffered. One evening, when she was undressing to go to bed, she called to mind all the liberties she had permitted. No detail was spared her, and it was in vain that her body revolted; along her nerves she felt the now shameful shudder of her former voluptuousness. She threw herself into her bed and soon, in the warmth, the imaginary contacts grew more numerous and precise. Then, losing her head, she yielded and went to sleep in a trance of pleasure.