"
"There you see the Sphinx and the mouse."
"Oh, but it all happened quite differently. I spoke first, I made
you every sort of advance; and what did you do? You held forth to me
on the mortification of the flesh. You ought to be ashamed of
yourself. And even when I saw that love was burning in your eyes,
you remained stiff-necked and tried to run away from me. If I was
set upon happiness, I found I must take it by force. I know you
better now. You were capable of never confessing your love to me, of
never asking anything of me. Am I right or not, tell me?"
"You are right," he murmured.
"But that would have been a sin--a deadly sin, a capital crime
against the High Majesty of Nature. What! Fate takes the trouble to
think out the most improbable combinations, sets the most
complicated machinery in motion to bring us together; it drags you
out of the depths of Germany, and me from Castile, and brings us to
a little hotel in a little village in Picardy, the very name of
which was unknown to either of us a short time before; we instantly
feel that we are made for one another and are certain to be happy
together, and yet all these exertions on the part of Fate are to
have been in vain? Never! Our paths crossed each other at a single
point, for a moment they were united, it depended on us whether they
should always remain so.
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