false, nor how far she is serious in her admissions or merely laughing
at you. She gives you the right to engage in a game of fence with her,
and suddenly by a glance, a gesture of proved potency, she closes the
combat and turns from you with your secret in her keeping, free to offer
you up in a jest, free to interest herself in you, safe alike in her
weakness and your strength.

Although the Marquise d'Aiglemont took up her position upon this neutral
ground during the first interview, she knew how to preserve a high
womanly dignity. The sorrows of which she never spoke seemed to hang
over her assumed gaiety like a light cloud obscuring the sun. When
Vandenesse went out, after a conversation which he had enjoyed more than
he had thought possible, he carried with him the conviction that this
was like to be too costly a conquest for his aspirations.

"It would mean sentiment from here to yonder," he thought, "and
correspondence enough to wear out a deputy second-clerk on his
promotion. And yet if I really cared----"

Luckless phrase that has been the ruin of many an infatuated mortal. In
France the way to love lies through self-love. Charles went back to Mme.
d'Aiglemont, and imagined that she showed symptoms of pleasure in his
conversion. And then, instead of giving himself up like a boy to the joy
of falling in love, he tried to play a double role. He did his best
to act passion and to keep cool enough to analyze the progress of this
flirtation, to be lover and diplomatist at once; but youth and hot blood
and analysis could only end in one way, over head and ears in love; for,
natural or artificial, the Marquise was more than his match. Each time
he went out from Mme. d'Aiglemont, he strenuously held himself to his
distrust, and submitted the progressive situations of his case to a
rigorous scrutiny fatal to his own emotions.

"To-day she gave me to understand that she has been very unhappy and
lonely," said he to himself, after the third visit, "and that but for
her little girl she would have longed for death. She was perfectly
resigned. Now as I am neither her brother nor her spiritual director,
why should she confide her troubles to _me_? She loves me."

Two days later he came away apostrophizing modern manners.

"Love takes on the hue of every age. In 1822 love is a doctrinaire.
Instead of proving love by deeds, as in times past, we have taken to
argument and rhetoric and debate. Women's tactics are reduced t