"
Then he kissed her once more many times, and put her gently within the
door and closed it.
A low, sharp, sudden cry reached him, went to his heart, but he did not
turn; he went on through the wet, green little garden, and the curling
leaves, where he had found peace and had left desolation.
CHAPTER XXI.
"I will let her alone, and she will marry Jeannot," thought Flamen; and
he believed himself a good man for once in his life, and pitied himself
for having become a sentimentalist.
She would marry Jeannot, and bear many children, as those people always
did; and ruddy little peasants would cling about these pretty, soft,
little breasts of hers; and she would love them after the manner of such
women, and be very content clattering over the stones in her wooden
shoes; and growing brown and stout, and more careful after money, and
ceasing to dream of unknown things, and not seeing God at all in the
fields, but looking low and beholding only the ears of the gleaning wheat
and the feet of the tottering children; and so gaining her bread, and
losing her soul, and stooping nearer and nearer to earth till she dropped
into it like one of her own wind-blown wall-flowers when the bee has
sucked out all its sweetness and the heats have scorched up all its
bloom:--yes, of course, she would marry Jeannot and end so!
Meanwhile he had his Gretchen, and that was the one great matter.
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