Page:The red and the black (1916).djvu/343

 Mathilde soon forgot the irritation of the comte de Caylus, the bad temper of Norbert, and the taciturn despair of M. de Croisenois. She had to decide one way or the other a fatal question which had just seized upon her soul.

"Julien is sincere enough with me," she said to herself, "a man at his age, in a inferior position, and rendered unhappy as he is by an extraordinary ambition, must have need of a woman friend. I am perhaps that friend, but I see no sign of love in him. Taking into account the audacity of his character he would surely have spoken to me about his love."

This uncertainty and this discussion with herself which henceforth monopolised Mathilde's time, and in connection with which she found new arguments each time that Julien spoke to her, completely routed those fits of boredom to which she had been so liable.

Daughter as she was of a man of intellect who might become a minister, mademoiselle de la Mole had been when in the convent of the Sacred Heart, the object of the most excessive flattery. This misfortune can never be compensated for. She had been persuaded that by reason of all her advantages of birth, fortune, etc., she ought to be happier than any one else. This is the cause of the boredom of princes and of all their follies.

Mathilde had not escaped the deadly influence of this idea. However intelligent one may be, one cannot at the age of ten be on one's guard against the flatteries of a whole convent, which are apparently so well founded.

From the moment that she had decided that she loved Julien, she was no longer bored. She congratulated herself every day on having deliberately decided to indulge in a grand passion. "This amusement is very dangerous," she thought. "All the better, all the better, a thousand times. Without a grand passion I should be languishing in boredom during the finest time of my life, the years from sixteen to twenty. I have already wasted my finest years: all my pleasure consisted in being obliged to listen to the silly arguments of my mother's friends who when at Coblentz in 1792 were not quite so strict, so they say, as their words of to-day."

It was while Mathilde was a prey to these great fits of uncertainly that Julien was baffled by those long looks of hers which lingered upon him. He noticed, no doubt, an