There are humbler compensations also. And among these the kind which, years after writing the immortal idyll of "Dr. Antonio," my dear venerated friend Ruffini set forth in a tiny story, perhaps partly his own, about the modest but very real happiness which the mere relationship of master and servant can bring into a solitary life; the story taking its name, by a coincidence by no means indifferent to me, from a faithful and pleasant person called Carlino.
But an end to digressions, for it is time to cease writing, particularly of such intangible and shy matters. So, to return to Madame de Hauterive's sentence, which was our starting-point in this inventory of compensations and consolations. Paradoxical though it seem, the understanding and union brought by a glance, by words said in a given way, by any of the trifles bearing mysterious, unreasoned significance for the experienced soul--or, briefly, "_friendship at first sight_"--is as natural in the sere and yellow, as love at first sight in the salad, days. Only, to be sure, less manifest to indifferent bystanders, since one of the consoling habits which life brings with it is a respect for life's thoroughfares, a reluctance to stop the way, collect a crowd with our private interests, and a pious reserve about such good fortune as is good precisely because it suits us, not other people.
Reserve of this sort, as I began with saying, is one of the charms of dear Madame de Hauterive; and the more so that eighteenth-century folk, particularly French, were not much given to it! And thus it happens that we know little or nothing about that friendship which consoled her later life; and must look round us in our own, if we would understand what were those new flowerings which had arisen, when, as she says, she had thought herself already in the last days of autumn and in a leafless garden.
"It doesn't seem to be precisely what is meant by _old paste_," she answered, repeating the expression I had just made use of, while she handed me the diamond hoop across the table. "It's too like real stones, you know. I think it must be a stage jewel."
As I fastened the brooch again in my dress, I was aware of a sudden little change in my feelings. I was no longer pleased. Not that I had hoped my diamonds might prove real; you cannot buy real diamonds, even in imagination, for four francs, which was the precise sum I had expended on these, and there were seven of them, all uncommonly large. Nor can I say that the words "old paste" had possessed, on my lips, any plain or positive meaning. But _stage jewel_, somehow ... My moral temperature had altered: I was dreadfully conscious that I was no longer pleased. Now, I had been, and to an absurd degree.