Page:A Virgin Heart.pdf/32

28 She made a pretty picture, as she sat there, gentle and, at the same time, wild. Her features, while they still preserved a trace of childishness, were growing marked and deﬁnite. She was a woman. How red her mouth was, how voluptuous! M. Hervart caught himself reﬂecting that that mouth would give most excellent kisses. What a fruit to bite, ﬁrm-ﬂeshed and succulent! Rose heaved a sigh, and it was as though a wave had lifted her white dress; all her young bosom had seemed to expand. M. Hervart had a vision of roseate whiteness, soft and living; he desired it as a child desires the peach he sees on the wall hidden under its long leaves. He took the pleasure in this desire that he had sometimes taken in standing before Titian's Portrait of a Young Lady. The obstacle was as insurmountable: Rose, so far as he was concerned, was an illusion.

"But that makes no difference," he said to himself, "I have desired her, which isn't chaste of me. If I had been in love with her, I should not have had that kind of vision. Therefore I am not in love with her. Fortunately!"

Rose was thinking of nothing. She was just