w he
must have raged in his lair of the Rue Hillerin-Bertin! I know where he
lives, I have his card: _F., Baron de Macumer_.

He has made it impossible for me to reply. All I can do is to fling
two camellias in his face. What fiendish arts does love possess--pure,
honest, simple-minded love! Here is the most tremendous crisis of a
woman's heart resolved into an easy, simple action. Oh, Asia! I have
read the _Arabian Nights_, here is their very essence: two flowers,
and the question is settled. We clear the fourteen volumes of _Clarissa
Harlowe_ with a bouquet. I writhe before this letter, like a thread in
the fire. To take, or not to take, my two camellias. Yes or No, kill or
give life! At last a voice cries to me, "Test him!" And I will test him.

XVI. THE SAME TO THE SAME March.

I am dressed in white--white camellias in my hair, and another in my
hand. My mother has red camellias; so it would not be impossible to
take one from her--if I wished! I have a strange longing to put off the
decision to the last moment, and make him pay for his red camellia by a
little suspense.

What a vision of beauty! Griffith begged me to stop for a little and
be admired. The solemn crisis of the evening and the drama of my secret
reply have given me a color; on each cheek I sport a red camellia laid
upon a white!

1 A. M.

Everybody admired me, but only one adored. He hung his head as I entered
with a white camellia, but turned pale as the flower when, later, I took
a red one from my mother's hand. To arrive with the two flowers might
possibly have been accidental; but this deliberate action was a reply.
My confession, therefore, is fuller than it need have been.

The opera was _Romeo and Juliet_. As you don't know the duet of the two
lovers, you can't understand the bliss of two neophytes in love, as they
listen to this divine outpouring of the heart.

On returning home I went to bed, but only to count the steps which
resounded on the sidewalk. My heart and head, darling, are all on fire
now. What is he doing? What is he thinking of? Has he a thought, a
single thought, that is not of me? Is he, in very truth, the devoted
slave he painted himself? How to be sure? Or, again, has it ever entered
his head that, if I accept him, I lay myself open to the shadow of a
reproach or am in any sense rewarding or thanking him? I am harrowed by
the hair-splitting casuistry of the heroines in _Cyrus_ and _Astraea_,
by all the subtle a