receive a letter from me, even after six months of intimate relationship! I don't think she ever looked at me with smiling eyes in her whole life."
He did not formulate so precisely the rest of his answer; was he perhaps ashamed of the triviality of the motive which were actuating him?
"But how different too," he went on to think, "are her elegant morning dress and her distinguished appearance! A man of taste on seeing mademoiselle de la Mole thirty yards off would infer the position which she occupies in society. That is what can be called a specific merit."
In spite of all this humorousness, Julien was not yet quite honest with himself; rnadame de Rênal had no marquis de Croisenois to sacrifice to him. His only rival was that grotesque sub-prefect, M. Charcot, who assumed the name of Maugiron, because there were no Maugirons left in France.
At five o'clock Julien received a third letter. It was thrown to him from the library door. Mademoiselle de la Mole ran away again. "What a mania for writing," he said to himself with a laugh, "when one can talk so easily. The enemy wants my letters, that is clear, and many of them." He did not hurry to open this one. "More elegant phrases," he thought; but he paled as he read it. There were only eight lines.
"I need to speak to you; I must speak to you this evening. Be in the garden at the moment when one o'clock is striking. Take the big gardeners' ladder near the well; place it against my window, and climb up to my room. It is moonlight; never mind."
