It was not only Odette's indifference, however, that he must take pains to
circumvent; it was also, not infrequently, his own; feeling that, since
Odette had had every facility for seeing him, she seemed no longer to have
very much to say to him when they did meet, he was afraid lest the
manner--at once trivial, monotonous, and seemingly unalterable--which she
now adopted when they were together should ultimately destroy in him that
romantic hope, that a day might come when she would make avowal of her
passion, by which hope alone he had become and would remain her lover. And
so to alter, to give a fresh moral aspect to that Odette, of whose
unchanging mood he was afraid of growing weary, he wrote, suddenly, a
letter full of hinted discoveries and feigned indignation, which he sent
off so that it should reach her before dinner-time. He knew that she would
be frightened, and that she would reply, and he hoped that, when the fear
of losing him clutched at her heart, it would force from her words such as
he had never yet heard her utter: and he was right--by repeating this
device he had won from her the most affectionate letters that she had, so
far, written him, one of them (which she had sent to him at midday by a
special messenger from the Maison Doree--it was the day of the
Paris-Murcie Fete given for the victims of the recent floods in Murcia)
beginning "My dear, my hand trembles so that I can scarcely write----";
and these letters he had kept in the same drawer as the withered
chrysanthemum.
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