ung men
whom Le Menil had introduced to her once, warning her not to trust them.
And with one of the white and cold fits of anger she had inherited
from her father she said to herself: "I must know who he is." In the
meanwhile what was she to do? Her lover in despair, mad, ill, she could
not run to him, embrace him, and throw herself on him with such an
abandonment that he would feel how entirely she was his, and be forced
to believe in her. Should she write? How much better it would be to go
to him, to fall upon his heart and say to him: "Dare to believe I am not
yours only!" But she could only write. She had hardly begun her letter
when she heard voices and laughter in the garden. Therese went
down, tranquil and smiling; her large straw hat threw on her face a
transparent shadow wherein her gray eyes shone.

"How beautiful she is!" exclaimed Princess Seniavine. "What a pity it
is we never see her! In the morning she is promenading in the alleys of
Saint Malo, in the afternoon she is closeted in her room. She runs away
from us."

The coach turned around the large circle of the beach at the foot of
the villas and gardens on the hillside. And they saw at the left the
ramparts and the steeple of St. Malo rise from the blue sea. Then the
coach went into a road bordered by hedges, along which walked Dinard
women, erect under their wide headdresses.

"Unfortunately," said Madame Raymond, seated on the box by Montessuy's
side, "old costumes are dying out. The fault is with the railways."

"It is true," said Montessuy, "that if it were not for the railways the
peasants would still wear their picturesque costumes of other times. But
we should not see them."

"What does it matter?" replied Madame Raymond. "We could imagine them."

"But," asked the Princess Seniavine, "do you ever see interesting
things? I never do."

Madame Raymond, who had taken from her husband's books a vague tint of
philosophy, declared that things were nothing, and that the idea was
everything.

Without looking at Madame Berthier-d'Eyzelles, seated at her right, the
Countess Martin murmured:

"Oh, yes, people see only their ideas; they follow only their ideas.
They go along, blind and deaf. One can not stop them."

"But, my dear," said Count Martin, placed in front of her, by the
Princess's side, "without leading ideas one would go haphazard. Have you
read, Montessuy, the speech delivered by Loyer at the unveiling of
the Cadet-Gassicourt statue