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she had been told, and not at all that it should be the place
to which my family were proposing to send me. When she
assured me (as sometimes happened) that she liked me less
than some other of her friends, less than she had liked me
the day before, because by my clumsiness I had made her
side lose a game, I would beg her pardon, I would beg her to
tell me what I must do in order that she should begin again
to like me as much as, or more than the rest; I hoped to hear
her say that that was already my position; I besought her; as
though she had been able to modify her affection for me as
she or I chose, to give me pleasure, merely by the words that
she would utter, as my good or bad conduct should deserve.
Was I, then, not yet aware that what I felt, myself, for her,
depended neither upon her actions nor upon my desires?
It shewed me finally, the new arrangement planned by
my unseen weaver, that, if we find ourselves hoping that the
actions of a person who has hitherto caused us anxiety may
prove not to have been sincere, they shed in their wake a
light which our hopes are powerless to extinguish, a light to
which, rather than to our hopes, we must put the question,
what will be that person’s actions on the morrow.
These new counsels, my love listened and heard them;
they persuaded it that the morrow would not be different
from all the days that had gone before; that Gilberte’s feeling
for me, too long established now to be capable of alteration,
was indifference; that hi my friendship with Gilberte, it was
I alone who loved. ‘That is true,’ my love responded, ‘there is
nothing more to be made of that friendship. It will not alter
now.’ And so the very next day (unless I were to wait for a

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