because you find it
impossible to share his pleasures? Do you never think at times that
marriage is a heavier yoke than an illicit passion could be?"

"Oh, that is just it," she wept. "It is all a riddle to me, and can you
guess it all? My faculties are benumbed, I have no ideas, I can scarcely
see at all. I am weighed down by vague dread, which freezes me till
I cannot feel, and keeps me in continual torpor. I have no voice with
which to pity myself, no words to express my trouble. I suffer, and I am
ashamed to suffer when Victor is happy at my cost."

"Babyish nonsense, and rubbish, all of it!" exclaimed the aunt, and a
gay smile, an after-glow of the joys of her own youth, suddenly lighted
up her withered face.

"And do you too laugh!" the younger woman cried despairingly.

"It was just my own case," the Marquise returned promptly. "And
now Victor has left you, you have become a girl again, recovering a
tranquillity without pleasure and without pain, have you not?"

Julie opened wide eyes of bewilderment.

"In fact, my angel, you adore Victor, do you not? But still you would
rather be a sister to him than a wife, and, in short, your marriage is
emphatically not a success?"

"Well--no, aunt. But why do you smile?"

"Oh! you are right, poor child! There is nothing very amusing in all
this. Your future would be big with more than one mishap if I had not
taken you under my protection, if my old experience of life had not
guessed the very innocent cause of your troubles. My nephew did
not deserve his good fortune, the blockhead! In the reign of our
well-beloved Louis Quinze, a young wife in your position would very
soon have punished her husband for behaving like a ruffian. The selfish
creature! The men who serve under this Imperial tyrant are all of them
ignorant boors. They take brutality for gallantry; they know no more of
women than they know of love; and imagine that because they go out
to face death on the morrow, they may dispense to-day with all
consideration and attentions for us. The time was when a man could love
and die too at the proper time. My niece, I will form you. I will put an
end to this unhappy divergence between you, a natural thing enough, but
it would end in mutual hatred and desire for a divorce, always supposing
that you did not die on the way to despair."

Julie's amazement equaled her surprise as she listened to her aunt. She
was surprised by her language, dimly divining rather than