d the air of mistress of the house,
and rose.

"Ah! you are a great wizard," said Flavie Colleville, accepting la
Peyrade's arm to return to the salon.

"And yet I care only to bewitch you," he answered. "I think you more
enchanting than ever this evening."

"Thuillier," she said, to evade the subject, "Thuillier made to think
himself a political character! oh! oh!"

"But, my dear Flavie, half the absurdities of life are the result of
such conspiracies; and men are not alone in these deceptions. In how
many families one sees the husband, children, and friends persuading a
silly mother that she is a woman of sense, or an old woman of fifty that
she is young and beautiful. Hence, inconceivable contrarieties for
those who go about the world with their eyes shut. One man owes his
ill-savored conceit to the flattery of a mistress; another owes his
versifying vanity to those who are paid to call him a great poet.
Every family has its great man; and the result is, as we see it in the
Chamber, general obscurity of the lights of France. Well, men of real
mind are laughing to themselves about it, that's all. You are the mind
and the beauty of this little circle of the petty bourgeoisie; it is
this superiority which led me in the first instance to worship you. I
have since longed to drag you out of it; for I love you sincerely--more
in friendship than in love; though a great deal of love is gliding into
it," he added, pressing her to his heart under cover of the recess of a
window to which he had taken her.

"Madame Phellion will play the piano," cried Colleville. "We must all
dance to-night--bottles and Brigitte's francs and all the little girls!
I'll go and fetch my clarionet."

He gave his empty coffee-cup to his wife, smiling to see her so friendly
with la Peyrade.

"What have you said and done to my husband?" asked Flavie, when
Colleville had left them.

"Must I tell you all our secrets?"

"Ah! you don't love me," she replied, looking at him with the coquettish
slyness of a woman who is not quite decided in her mind.

"Well, since you tell me yours," he said, letting himself go to the
lively impulse of Provencal gaiety, always so charming and apparently so
natural, "I will not conceal from you an anxiety in my heart."

He took her back to the same window and said, smiling:--

"Colleville, poor man, has seen in me the artist repressed by all these
bourgeois; silent before them because I feel misjudged, misunders