She was cut to the quick; she wished to re-read the letter, and lit a candle; she studied the sentences so carefully studied when written; and ended by hearing the wheezing voice of the outer world.
"He is right, and I am wrong," she said to herself.

"But who could ever believe that under the starry mantle of a poet I should find nothing but one of Moliere's old men ?" When a woman or young girl is taken in the act, "flagrante delicto," she conceives a deadly hatred to the witness, the author, or the object of her fault.

And so the true, the single-minded, the untamed and untamable Modeste conceived within her soul an unquenchable desire to get the better of that righteous spirit, to drive him into some fatal inconsistency, and so return him blow for blow.

This girl, this child, as we may call her, so pure, whose head alone had been misguided,--partly by her reading, partly by her sister's sorrows, and more perhaps by the dangerous meditations of her solitary life,--was suddenly caught by a ray of sunshine flickering across her face.

She had been standing for three hours on the shores of the vast sea of Doubt.
Nights like these are never forgotten.