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compounded of every enthusiasm, of both physical and moral admiration.
Moreover, you should never tell a woman a word difficult to understand.
She will dream about it, and she often dreams falsely. An enigma in a
reverie spoils it. The shock caused by the fall of a careless word
displaces that against which it strikes. At times it happens, without
our knowing why, that because we have received the obscure blow of a
chance word the heart empties itself insensibly of love. He who loves
perceives a decline in his happiness. Nothing is to be feared more than
this slow exudation from the fissure in the vase.
Happily, Dea was not formed of such clay. The stuff of which other women
are made had not been used in her construction. She had a rare nature.
The frame, but not the heart, was fragile. A divine perseverance in love
was in the heart of her being.
The whole disturbance which the word used by Gwynplaine had produced in
her ended in her saying one day,--
"To be ugly--what is it? It is to do wrong. Gwynplaine only does good.
He is handsome."
Then, under the form of interrogation so familiar to children and to
the blind, she resumed,--
"
To see--what is it that you call seeing? For my own part, I cannot see;
I know. It seems that to see means to hide."
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