Page:The Story of Manon Lescaut and of the Chevalier des Grieux.pdf/285

289 with our modest income. My way of life was blameless and exemplary, and Manon's was no less so. We lost no opportunity of serving our neighbors and doing them acts of kindness. This obliging disposition on our part, and the amiability of our manners, gained us the confidence and affection of the whole colony, and we advanced so rapidly in the general esteem that we soon ranked as the leading persons in the town, after the Governor.

The innocence of our occupations and the undisturbed tranquillity of our lives served insensibly to revive our early feelings of piety. Manon had never been an irreligious girl; nor was I to be classed among those reckless libertines who glory in adding godlessness to depravity of morals. Youth and its passions had been to blame for all our past transgressions, and now experience was beginning to supply the place of age for us, producing the same results that increasing years would have brought about.

Our conversations, which were habitually of a serious turn, gradually inspired us with a longing for virtuous love. I was the first to propose this change to Manon, knowing, as I did, the principles which ruled in her breast. She was upright and sincere in all her sentiments; and these are qualities which invariably predispose their possessor towards virtue. I explained to her that there was one thing lacking to make our happiness complete, "and that," said I, "is the approval of Heaven. We are both of us too high-minded and pure-hearted to be content to live on in the voluntary violation of our plain duty. We did so live in France, I own; and there it was excusable; for it was impossible for us to cease to love one another, and equally so for us to satisfy our passion legitimately. But in America, where we have no one to consult but ourselves, where we need no longer pay any heed to the arbitrary decrees of rank and conventional usage, where