never love men who pretend to teach us; they rub up all our
little vanities."

"And that wretched boy who hanged himself?"

"Lucien? An Antinous and a great poet. I worshiped him in all
conscience, and I might have been happy. But he was in love with a girl
of the town; and I gave him up to Madame de Serizy.... If he had cared
to love me, should I have given him up?"

"What an odd thing, that you should come into collision with an Esther!"

"She was handsomer than I," said the Princess.--"Very soon it shall be
three years that I have lived in solitude," she resumed, after a pause,
"and this tranquillity has nothing painful to me about it. To you
alone can I dare to say that I feel I am happy. I was surfeited with
adoration, weary of pleasure, emotional on the surface of things, but
conscious that emotion itself never reached my heart. I have found all
the men whom I have known petty, paltry, superficial; none of them ever
caused me a surprise; they had no innocence, no grandeur, no delicacy. I
wish I could have met with one man able to inspire me with respect."

"Then are you like me, my dear?" asked the marquise; "have you never
felt the emotion of love while trying to love?"

"Never," replied the princess, laying her hand on the arm of her friend.

They turned and seated themselves on a rustic bench beneath a jasmine
then coming into flower. Each had uttered one of those sayings that are
solemn to women who have reached their age.

"Like you," resumed the princess, "I have received more love than most
women; but through all my many adventures, I have never found happiness.
I committed great follies, but they had an object, and that object
retreated as fast as I approached it. I feel to-day in my heart, old
as it is, an innocence which has never been touched. Yes, under all my
experience, lies a first love intact,--just as I myself, in spite of all
my losses and fatigues, feel young and beautiful. We may love and not
be happy; we may be happy and never love; but to love and be happy, to
unite those two immense human experiences, is a miracle. That miracle
has not taken place for me."

"Nor for me," said Madame d'Espard.

"I own I am pursued in this retreat by dreadful regret: I have amused
myself all through life, but I have never loved."

"What an incredible secret!" cried the marquise.

"Ah! my dear," replied the princess, "such secrets we can tell to
ourselves, you and I, but nobody in Paris would belie