"This purpose immediately became a fixed idea with me, actually as if my own honor were staked on the result. As I knew that I was absolutely proof against her charm, I proceeded to its execution without the faintest scruples. She had long regarded my reserve with amazement and anger; the consequence was that nothing was easier for me than to take advantage of the first chance meeting I could bring about, to conquer a place among her intimates.
"I will refrain from inflicting upon you, scene for scene, an account of the wretched comedy that now began. The fact that I had to do with a skillful opponent aroused my ambition, and stung into life all the dormant obstinacy of my character, so that, at the end of a week--for she, too, staked all her pride upon finally seeing me at her feet like all the others--we two stood confronting each other almost alone; her former circle of admirers had withdrawn discomfited.
"The great aim of my tactics was to represent myself as thoroughly _blasé_ and unsusceptible, and to act as though I found the great charm of my intercourse with her merely in the fact that I had at last encountered a kindred nature, who, like me, had long since disclaimed, as a ridiculous delusion, the possession of any warmth of feeling. She accepted the _rôle_ I assigned to her, but it never occurred to her for a moment to cease trying to tempt me out of mine. Occasional human emotions, into which I now and then allowed my calumniated heart to be betrayed, gave her some right to hope; and the freedom of a watering-place afforded a hundred opportunities for putting me to the test.
"Well, it turned out just as it could not help turning out. One evening we came home from a stormy sailing excursion, which had not been entirely free from danger, half wet through and hungry. The return trip had been delayed from the fact of the skipper's having been obliged to stop in the midst of the storm, to mend, as well as he could under the circumstances, a leak in his boat; the consequence was it was late when we reached her fisher's cottage. She herself seemed to have forgotten her enforced _rôle_ for the moment, and appeared to have no other end in view than to refresh and warm me before dismissing me to my lodgings. While she went into her chamber and put on some dry garments, I was forced to stay in the front-room, which was itself little more than a small bedroom, and exchange my coat--which had been soaked through and through with the salt water--for a Turkish jacket she had selected from her wardrobe; and soon, the tea steaming on the table, the warmth of the fire--which was very grateful in spite of its being early fall--and, above all, the extraordinary manner in which we were dressed after the dangers we had escaped, threw us both into a reckless and merry mood such as I had never before experienced in her presence.