Her thoughts finally reverted to Florent's adversary, to Boleslas Gorka, whose wife was her friend and whom she had always found so courteous.

What if she should ask him to spare her brother?
It was not Florent against whom the discarded lover bore a grudge.

Would he not be touched by her tears?
Would he not tell her what had led to the quarrel and what she should ask of her brother that the quarrel might be conciliated?
Could she not obtain from him the promise to discharge his weapon in the air, if the duel was with pistols, or, if it was with swords, simply to disarm his enemy?
Like nearly all persons unversed in the art, she believed in infallible fencers, in marksmen who never missed their aim, and she had also ideas profoundly, absolutely inexact on the relations of one man with another in the matter of an insult.

But how can women admit that inflexible rigor in certain cases, which forms the foundation of manly relations, when they themselves allow of a similar rigor neither in their arguments with men, nor in their discussions among themselves?
Accustomed always to appeal from convention to instinct and from reason to sentiment, they are, in the face of certain laws, be they those of justice or of honor, in a state of incomprehension worse than ignorance.

A duel, for example, appears to them like an arbitrary drama, which the wish of one of those concerned can change at his fancy.