She imagined that in denying him she would be doing him a wrong, depriving him of his share, angering him.

She held her peace, fearing to see him come and rest his elbows on the table, with his fixed smile and the hole in his head, and to hear him say in his plaintive voice.

"Felicie, you surely cannot have forgotten our little room, in the Rue des Martyrs ?" What he had become, for her, since his death, she could not have said, so alien was it to her beliefs, so contrary to her reason, and so antiquated, ridiculous and obsolete did the words which would have expressed her feeling seem to her.

But from some remote inherited instinct, or more likely from certain tales which she had heard in her childhood, she derived a confused idea that he was of the number of those dead who in the days of old were wont to torment the living, and were exorcised by the priests; for upon thinking of him she instinctively began to make the sign of the cross, and she checked herself only that she might not seem ridiculous.
Ligny, seeing her melancholy and distracted, blamed himself for his harsh and useless words, while at the very moment of reproaching himself for them he followed them by others equally harsh and equally useless.
"And yet you told me it was not true!" She replied, fervently: "Because, don't you see, I wanted it not to be true." She added: "Oh, my darling, since I've been yours, I swear to you that I've not belonged to anyone else.

I don't claim any merit for this; I should have found it impossible." Like the young of animals, she had need of gaiety.