This noble compassion, this intuition of the struggles of toilers, this worship of genius, are among the choicest perceptions that flutter through the souls of women.

They are, in the first place, a secret between the woman and God, for they are hidden; in them there is nothing striking, nothing that gratifies the vanity,--that powerful auxiliary to all action among the French.
Out of this third period of the development of her ideas, there came to Modeste a passionate desire to penetrate to the heart of one of these abnormal beings; to understand the working of the thoughts and the hidden griefs of genius,--to know not only what it wanted but what it was.

At the period when this story begins, these vagaries of fancy, these excursions of her soul into the void, these feelers put forth into the darkness of the future, the impatience of an ungiven love to find its goal, the nobility of all her thoughts of life, the decision of her mind to suffer in a sphere of higher things rather than flounder in the marshes of provincial life like her mother, the pledge she had made to herself never to fail in conduct, but to respect her father's hearth and bring it happiness,--all this world of feeling and sentiment had lately come to a climax and taken shape.

Modeste wished to be the friend and companion of a poet, an artist, a man in some way superior to the crowd of men.

But she intended to choose him,--not to give him her heart, her life, her infinite tenderness freed from the trammels of passion, until she had carefully and deeply studied him.
She began this pretty romance by simply enjoying it.