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passion should be analyzed in its most delicate fibres; for it became,
scoffers might say, a malady which influenced her whole existence.
Many people prefer to deny results rather than estimate the force of
ties and links and bonds, which secretly join one fact to another in
the moral order. Here, therefore, Eugenie's past life will offer to
observers of human nature an explanation of her naive want of
reflection and the suddenness of the emotions which overflowed her
soul. The more tranquil her life had been, the more vivid was her
womanly pity, the more simple-minded were the sentiments now developed
in her soul.

Made restless by the events of the day, she woke at intervals to
listen to her cousin, thinking she heard the sighs which still echoed
in her heart. Sometimes she saw him dying of his trouble, sometimes
she dreamed that he fainted from hunger. Towards morning she was
certain that she heard a startling cry. She dressed at once and ran,
in the dawning light, with a swift foot to her cousin's chamber, the
door of which he had left open. The candle had burned down to the
socket. Charles, overcome by nature, was sleeping, dressed and sitting
in an armchair beside the bed, on which his head rested; he dreamed as
men dream on an empty stomach. Eugenie might weep at her ease; she
might admire the young and handsome face blotted with grief, the eyes
swollen with weeping, that seemed, sleeping as they were, to well
forth tears. Charles felt sympathetically the young girl's presence;
he opened his eyes and saw her pitying him.

"Pardon me, my cousin," he said, evidently not knowing the hour nor
the place in which he found himself.

"There are hearts who hear you, cousin, and _we_ thought you might
need something. You should go to bed; you tire yourself by sitting
thus."

"That is true."

"Well, then, adieu!"

She escaped, ashamed and happy at having gone there. Innocence alone
can dare to be so bold. Once enlightened, virtue makes her
calculations as well as vice. Eugenie, who had not trembled beside her
cousin, could scarcely stand upon her legs when she regained her
chamber. Her ignorant life had suddenly come to an end; she reasoned,
she rebuked herself with many reproaches.

"What will he think of me? He will think that I love him!"

That was what she most wished him to think. An honest love has its own
prescience, and knows that love begets love. What an event for this
poor solitary girl thus to have entered the chamber of a young man!
Are there not thoughts and actions in the life of love which to
certain souls bear the full meaning of the holiest espousals? An hour
later she went to her mother and dressed her as usual. Then they both
came down and sat in their places before the window waiting for
Grandet, with that cruel anxiety which, according to the individual
character, freezes the heart or warms it, shrivels or dilates it, when

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