If our pleasures could be described, their simplicity would make you laugh; our excursions together out of town, in which I would munificently expend eight or ten halfpence in some rural tavern; our modest suppers at my window, seated in front of one another on two small chairs placed on a trunk that filled up the breadth of the embrasure.
Here the window did duty for a table, we breathed the fresh air, we could see the neighbourhood and the people passing by, and though on the fourth story, could look down into the street as we ate.

Who shall describe, who shall feel the charms of those meals, consisting of a coarse quartern loaf, some cherries, a tiny morsel of cheese, and a pint of wine which we drank between us?
Ah, what delicious seasoning there is in friendship, confidence, intimacy, gentleness of soul! We used sometimes to remain thus until midnight, without once thinking of the time."[129] Men and women are often more fairly judged by the way in which they bear the burden of what they have done, than by the prime act which laid the burden on their lives.[130] The deeper part of us shows in the manner of accepting consequences.

On the whole, Rousseau's relations with this woman present him in a better light than those with any other person whatever.

If he became with all the rest of the world suspicious, angry, jealous, profoundly diseased in a word, with her he was habitually trustful, affectionate, careful, most long-suffering.

It sometimes even occurs to us that his constancy to Theresa was only another side of the morbid perversity of his relations with the rest of the world.