It was all caste. Caste in London, caste in _Le Bos Canada_, all the same. Because she was a _St. Hilaire_. Her full name--_Hortense Angelique De Repentigny de St. Hilaire_--how it grates on me afresh with its aristocratic plentitude. She is well-born, certainly; better born than most of these girls I have seen here in London, driving, walking, riding in the Parks. They wear their hair over cushions too. Freckled skins, high cheek-bones, square foreheads, spreading eyebrows--they shouldn't wear it so. It suits Hortense--with her pale patrician outline and her dark pencilled eyebrows, and her little black ribbon and amulet around her neck. _O, Marie, priey pour nous qui avous recours a vous_! Once I walked out to _Beau Séjour_. She did not expect me and I crept through the leafy ravine to the pinewood, then on to the steps, and so up to the terrace. Through the French window I could see her seated at the long table opposite Father Couture. She lives alone with the good Père. She is the last one of the noble line, and he guards her well and guards her money too.
"I do remember that it vill be all for ze Church," she has said to me. And the priest has taught her all she knows, how to sew and embroider, and cook and read, though he never lets her read anything but works on religion. Religion, always religion! He has brought her up like a nun, crushed the life out of her. Until I found her out, found my jewel out. It is Tennyson who says that. But his "Maud" was freer to woo than Hortense, freer to love and kiss and hold--my God! that night while I watched them studying and bending over those cursed works on the Martyrs and the Saints and the Mission houses--I saw him--him--that old priest--take her in his arms and caress her, drink her breath, feast on her eyes, her hair, her delicate skin, and I burst in like a young madman and told Father Conture what I thought. Oh! I was mad! I should have won her first. I should have worked quietly, cautiously, waiting, waiting, biding my time. But I could never bide my time. And now she hates me, Hortense hates me, though she so nearly learned to love me. There where we used to listen to the magical river songs, we nearly loved, did we not Hortense? But she was a _St. Hilaire_, and I--I was nobody, and I had insulted _le bon Pere_. Yet if I can go back to her rich, prosperous, independent--What if that happen? But I begin to fancy it will never happen. My resolutions, where are they, what comes of them? Nothing. I have tried everything except the opera. Everything else has been rejected. For a week I have not gone to bed at all. I wait and see those ghastly gray fingers smoothing my pillow. I am not wanted. I am crowded out. My hands tremble and I cannot write. My eyes fail and I cannot see. To the window!