At the first insinuations of his friend M. Des Boys smiled and said:
"I thought as much. My daughter has received but the vaguest education. Her mother is incapable. As for me, I am interested only in art. She needs a serious husband, a husband, that is to say, who is not in his first youth. If she wants you, take her. I'll go and ask her."
M. Hervart was on the point of saying there was no need. But luckily he checked himself and M. Des Boys questioned his daughter.
"She said, 'I should like to,' She said it without enthusiasm, but she said it. Now go and arrange things yourselves. I shall go on with my painting."
M. Hervart admired Rose still more for her astute answer.
The girl was waiting for him as he came towards her, serious, scarcely smiling, but beautified by the profound emotion that she could scarcely contain. She gave him her hand, then her forehead; and when M. Hervart drew her into his arms, she burst into tears.
Meanwhile Leonor had received a wound which he could not support with patience. A hundred times a day he thought of Rose. He was not in love with the woman, he was in love with her love. He saw her as she had appeared to him in the wood at Robinvast, with her whole desire, her whole will, her whole body, turned innocently toward M. Hervart and he felt no jealousy; on the contrary, he admired the ingenuous force of so confiding, so powerful a love. By having been able to inspire such a love M. Hervart evoked in him an almost superstitious respect; he would willingly have helped him in his amour.
"I should like to know him," he said to himself naively; "I should ask him for advice and lessons. I should beg him to reveal his secret to me."
He would spend hours dreaming on this theme: to be loved like that. In these matters the most intelligent easily become childish. The ego is a wall that limits the view, rising higher in proportion as the man is greater. There is, however, a certain degree of greatness from which, when a man reaches it, he can always look over the top of the wall of his egoism; but that is very rare. Leonor was not a rare character; he was simply a man a little above the ordinary, capable of originality and of learning from experience, clever at his profession, apt at forming general ideas, sometimes refined and sometimes gross, a peasant rather than a man of the world, a solitary, cold of aspect, full of contradictions, ironic or ingenuous by fits, tormented by sexual images and sentimental ideas.