The two natures, her father’s and her mother’s, did more than just blend themselves in her; they disputed the possession of her⁠—and yet one cannot exactly say that, which would let it be thought that a third Gilberte was in the meantime suffering by being the prey of the two others. Whereas Gilberte was alternately one and the other, and at any given moment no more than one of the two, that is to say incapable, when she was not being good, of suffering accordingly, the better Gilberte not being able at the time, on account of her momentary absence, to detect the other’s lapse from virtue. And so the less good of the two was free to enjoy pleasures of an ignoble kind. When the other spoke to you from the heart of her father, she held broad views, you would have liked to engage with her upon a fine and beneficent enterprise; you told her so, but, just as your arrangements were being completed, her mother’s heart would already have resumed its control; hers was the voice that answered; and you were disappointed and vexed⁠—almost baffled, as in the face of a substitution of one person for another⁠—by an unworthy thought, an in sincere laugh, in which Gilberte saw no harm, for they sprang from what she herself at that moment was.