.

"I esteem and honor you profoundly," she cried, "for keeping your own
counsel as you have done. I am in love! Is this a sentiment which is
easy for me to repress? But what I can do is to confess the fact to
you; to implore you to protect me from myself, to save me from my own
folly. Be my master and be a stern master to me; take me away from
this place, remove me from what has caused all this trouble, console
me; I will forget him, I desire to do so. I do not wish to betray you.
I humbly ask your pardon for the treachery love has suggested to me.
Yes, I confess to you that the love which I pretended to have for my
cousin was a snare set to deceive you. I love him with the love of
friendship and no more.--Oh! forgive me! I can love no one but"--her
voice was choked in passionate sobs--"Oh! let us go away, let us leave
Paris!"

She began to weep; her hair was disheveled, her dress in disarray; it
was midnight, and her husband forgave her. From henceforth, the cousin
made his appearance without risk, and the Minotaur devoured one victim
more.

What instructions can we give for contending with such adversaries as
these? Their heads contain all the diplomacy of the congress of
Vienna; they have as much power when they are caught as when they
escape. What man has a mind supple enough to lay aside brute force and
strength and follow his wife through such mazes as these?

To make a false plea every moment, in order to elicit the truth, a
true plea in order to unmask falsehood; to charge the battery when
least expected, and to spike your gun at the very moment of firing it;
to scale the mountain with the enemy, in order to descend to the plain
again five minutes later; to accompany the foe in windings as rapid,
as obscure as those of a plover on the breezes; to obey when obedience
is necessary, and to oppose when resistance is inertial; to traverse
the whole scale of hypotheses as a young artist with one stroke runs
from the lowest to the highest note of his piano; to divine at last
the secret purpose on which a woman is bent; to fear her caresses and
to seek rather to find out what are the thoughts that suggested them
and the pleasure which she derived from them--this is mere child's pay
for the man of intellect and for those lucid and searching
imaginations which possess the gift of doing and thinking at the same
time. But there are a vast number of husbands who are terrified at the
mere idea of putting in practice the