Alice, or the Mysteries — Book 06

								

for the present, and looked with quiet hope towards the future. Her
character was still spotless; or rather, every year of temptation and
trial had given it a fairer lustre.  Love, that might have ruined, being
once subdued, preserved her from all after danger.  The first meeting
between Maltravers and Valerie was, it is true, one of some embarrassment
and reserve: not so the second.  They did but once, and that slightly,
recur to the past, and from that moment, as by a tacit understanding,
true friendship between them dated.  Neither felt mortified to see that
an illusion had passed away,--they were no longer the same in each
other's eyes.  Both might be improved, and were so; but the Valerie and
the Ernest of Naples were as things dead and gone!  Perhaps Valerie's
heart was even more reconciled to the cure of its soft and luxurious
malady by the renewal of their acquaintance.  The mature and experienced
reasoner, in whom enthusiasm had undergone its usual change, with the
calm brow and commanding aspect of sober manhood, was a being so
different from the romantic boy, new to the actual world of civilized
toils and pleasures, fresh from the adventures of Eastern wanderings, and
full of golden dreams of poetry before it settles into authorship or
action!  She missed the brilliant errors, the daring aspirations,--even
the animated gestures and eager eloquence,--that had interested and
enamoured her in the loiterer by the shores of Baiae, or amidst the
tomb-like chambers of Pompeii.  For the Maltravers now before her--wiser,
better, nobler, even handsomer than of yore (for he was one whom manhood
became better than youth)--the Frenchwoman could at any period have felt
friendship without danger.  It seemed to her, not as it really was, the
natural development, but the very contrast, of the ardent, variable,
imaginative boy, by whose side she had gazed at night on the moonlit
waters and rosy skies of the soft Parthenope!  How does time, after long
absence, bring to us such contrasts between the one we remember and the
one we see!  And what a melancholy mockery does it seem of our own vain
hearts, dreaming of impressions never to be changed, and affections that
never can grow cool!
And now, as they conversed with all the ease of cordial and guileless
friendship, how did Valerie rejoice in secret that upon that friendship
there rested no blot of shame! and that she had not forfeited those
consolations for a home without love, which had at last settled into
cheerful nor unhallowed resignation,--consolations only to be found in
the conscience and the pride!
M. de Ventadour had not altered, except that his nose was longer, and
that he now wore a peruque in full curl instead of his own straight hair.
But somehow or other--perhaps by the mere charm of custom--he had grown
more pleasing in Valerie's eyes; habit had reconciled her to his foibles,
deficiencies, and faults; and, by comparison with others, she could