. . ."
Only those who have passed through all the exceeding tribulations of
youth, who have seized on all the chimeras with two white pinions, the
nightmare fancies at the disposal of a fervid imagination, can realize
the horrors that seized upon Gaston de Nueil when he had reason to
suppose that his ultimatum was in Mme. de Beauseant's hands. He saw
the Vicomtesse, wholly untouched, laughing at his letter and his love,
as those can laugh who have ceased to believe in love. He could have
wished to have his letter back again. It was an absurd letter. There
were a thousand and one things, now that he came to think of it, that
he might have said, things infinitely better and more moving than
those stilted phrases of his, those accursed, sophisticated,
pretentious, fine-spun phrases, though, luckily, the punctuation had
been pretty bad and the lines shockingly crooked. He tried not to
think, not to feel; but he felt and thought, and was wretched. If he
had been thirty years old, he might have got drunk, but the innocence
of three-and-twenty knew nothing of the resources of opium nor of the
expedients of advanced civilization. Nor had he at hand one of those
good friends of the Parisian pattern who understand so well how to say
/Poete, non dolet!/ by producing a bottle of champagne, or alleviate
the agony of suspense by carrying you off somewhere to make a night of
it.
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