But she did not know--nobody could know--how impossible that
danger seemed to me.
VII
Can the transports of first love be calmed, checked, turned to a cold
suspicion of the future by a grave quotation from a work on political
economy? I ask--is it conceivable? Is it possible? Would it be right?
With my feet on the very shores of the sea and about to embrace my
blue-eyed dream, what could a good-natured warning as to spoiling one's
life mean to my youthful passion? It was the most unexpected and the
last, too, of the many warnings I had received. It sounded to me very
bizarre--and, uttered as it was in the very presence of my enchantress,
like the voice of folly, the voice of ignorance. But I was not so
callous or so stupid as not to recognize there also the voice of
kindness. And then the vagueness of the warning--because what can be the
meaning of the phrase: to spoil one's life?--arrested one's attention
by its air of wise profundity. At any rate, as I have said before,
the words of la belle Madame Delestang made me thoughtful for a whole
evening. I tried to understand and tried in vain, not having any notion
of life as an enterprise that could be mi managed.
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