s not love, and who has resisted nine admirers, will yield to
the tenth. The only question for me was to be the tenth. Here began the
problem to be solved.

"Madame de Bergenheim had been married only three years; her husband,
who was good-looking and young, passed for a model husband; if these
latter considerations were of little importance, the first was of great
weight. According to all probability, it was too soon for any serious
attack. Without being beautiful, she pleased much and many; a second
obstacle, since sensibility in women is almost always developed in
inverse ratio to their success. She had brains; she was wonderfully
aristocratic in all her tastes.

"Last, being very much the fashion, sought after and envied, she was
under the special surveillance of pious persons, old maids, retired
beauties in one word, all that feminine mounted police, whose eyes,
ears, and mouths seem to have assumed the express mission of annoying
sensitive hearts while watching over the preservation of good morals.

"This mass of difficulties, none of which escaped me, traced as many
lines upon my forehead as if I had been commanded to solve at once
all the propositions in Euclid. She shall love me! these words flashed
unceasingly before my eyes; but the means to attain this end? No
satisfactory plan came to me. Women are so capricious, deep, and
unfathomable! It is, with them, the thing soonest done which is soonest
ended! A false step, the least awkwardness, a want of intelligence, a
quarter of an hour too soon or too late! One thing only was evident:
it needed a grand display of attractions, a complete plan of gallant
strategy; but, then, what more?

"That earthly paradise of the Montanvert was far from us, where I had
been able in less time than it would take to walk over a quadrille, to
expose her to death, to save her afterward, and finally to say to her 'I
love you!' Passion in drawing-rooms is not allowed those free, dramatic
ways; flowers fade in the candle-light; the oppressive atmosphere of
balls and fetes stifles the heart, so ready to dilate in pure mountain
air. The unexpected and irresistible influence of the glacier would have
been improper and foolish in Paris. There, an artless sympathy,
stronger than social conventions, had drawn us to each other--Octave and
Clemence. Here, she was the Baroness de Bergenheim, and I the Vicomte
de Gerfaut. I must from necessity enter the ordinary route, begin the
romance at t