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Bebee; Or, Two Little Wooden Shoes, a fiction by Ouida |
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CHAPTER XXI |
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_ "I will let her alone, and she will marry Jeannot," thought Flamen; and he believed himself a good man for once in his life, and pitied himself for having become a sentimentalist. She would marry Jeannot, and bear many children, as those people always did; and ruddy little peasants would cling about these pretty, soft, little breasts of hers; and she would love them after the manner of such women, and be very content clattering over the stones in her wooden shoes; and growing brown and stout, and more careful after money, and ceasing to dream of unknown things, and not seeing God at all in the fields, but looking low and beholding only the ears of the gleaning wheat and the feet of the tottering children; and so gaining her bread, and losing her soul, and stooping nearer and nearer to earth till she dropped into it like one of her own wind-blown wall-flowers when the bee has sucked out all its sweetness and the heats have scorched up all its bloom:--yes, of course, she would marry Jeannot and end so! Meanwhile he had his Gretchen, and that was the one great matter. So he left the street of Mary of Burgundy, and went on his way out of the chiming city as its matin bells were rung, and took with him a certain regret, and the only innocent affection that had ever awakened in him; and thought of his self-negation with half admiration and half derision; and so drifted away into the whirlpool of his amorous, cynical, changeful, passionate, callous, many-colored life, and said to himself as he saw the last line of the low green plains shine against the sun, "She will marry Jeannot--of course, she will marry Jeannot. And my Gretchen is greater than Scheffer's." What else mattered very much, after all, except what they would say in Paris of Gretchen? _ |
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