Often she has never even seen him, but he is charming, and she feels that she loves him already.
And there are the brilliant displays of the future appearing, the enchanted palaces which are built out of the chapters of novels which never will be finished.
And thus every evening--wild adventures in the young brain, intrigues in embryo, meetings full of mystery, delightful terrors with phantom lovers, until at length a very palpable one presents himself, and comes and knocks at the door of reality.
Sometimes he is very far from the cherished dream. He is neither young, nor handsome, nor rich, nor intelligent. She rather makes a face, but she ends by taking him. It is a man.
And meanwhile mamma has said as she kisses her daughter's forehead, "Sleep well, my daughter," and she murmurs to papa, "What an angel of candour!"
"I turned my eyes instinctively towards the lighted window, and through the curtains which were drawn, I distinctly caught sight of a woman, dressed in white, with her hair undone, and moving like one who knows that she is alone."
Suzanne's room ... but why should I describe the room?... let me describe Suzanne to you at this secret hour: I am sure that you would prefer me to do so.
The young people who read this, will do well to skip this chapter, it interests the men alone. Like the preacher who one day turned the women out of church, as he wanted to keep the men only, I warn over-chaste young ladies that these lines may shock....
To go to bed! That is not done quickly. You have, Mesdames, so many little things to do before going to bed. So Suzanne was going to and fro in her small room, attending to all these little details.
She was in a short petticoat, with her legs and arms bare and her little feet in slippers. I warned you that I had borrowed the ring of Gyges and I can tell you that I saw her calf and right above the knee, and all was like a sculptor's model. Beneath the thin, partly-open cambric her budding bosom rose and fell, marking a voluptuous valley on which, like the Shulamite's lover, one would never be weary to let one's kisses wander.
But on seeing the white plump shoulders, the graceful throat, and the neck on which was twisted a mass of little brown curls, and the back of velvet which had no other covering than the thick rolls of half-loosed hair, and the delicate hips which the little half-revealing petticoat closely pressed, one asked oneself where the kisses would run on for the longest time.