“Someone is coming!” she said.
He blew out the light.
“Have you your pistols?”
“Why?”
“Why, to defend yourself,” replied Emma.
“From your husband? Oh, poor devil!” And Rodolphe finished his sentence with a gesture that said, “I could crush him with a flip of my finger.”
She was wonder-stricken at his bravery, although she felt in it a sort of indecency and a naive coarseness that scandalised her.
Rodolphe reflected a good deal on the affair of the pistols. If she had spoken seriously, it was very ridiculous, he thought, even odious; for he had no reason to hate the good Charles, not being what is called devoured by jealousy; and on this subject Emma had taken a great vow that he did not think in the best of taste.
Besides, she was growing very sentimental. She had insisted on exchanging miniatures; they had cut off handfuls of hair, and now she was asking for a ring—a real wedding-ring, in sign of an eternal union. She often spoke to him of the evening chimes, of the voices of nature. Then she talked to him of her mother—hers! and of his mother—his! Rodolphe had lost his twenty years ago. Emma none the less consoled him with caressing words as one would have done a lost child, and she sometimes even said to him, gazing at the moon—
“I am sure that above there together they approve of our love.”
But she was so pretty. He had possessed so few women of such ingenuousness. This love without debauchery was a new experience for