e old time with its:
"Shall I go? Shall I not go? Shall I write to him? Shall I not write?"

Is it thus with all our pleasures? Is suspense always better than
enjoyment? Hope than fruition? Is it the rich who in very truth are
the poor? Have we not both perhaps exaggerated feeling by giving to
imagination too free a rein? There are times when this thought freezes
me. Shall I tell you why? Because I am meditating another visit to
the bottom of the garden--without Griffith. How far could I go in this
direction? Imagination knows no limit, but it is not so with pleasure.
Tell me, dear be-furbelowed professor, how can one reconcile the two
goals of a woman's existence?

XXII. LOUISE TO FELIPE

I am not pleased with you. If you did not cry over Racine's _Berenice_,
and feel it to be the most terrible of tragedies, there is no kinship in
our souls; we shall never get on together, and had better break off
at once. Let us meet no more. Forget me; for if I do not have a
satisfactory reply, I shall forget you. You will become M. le Baron de
Macumer for me, or rather you will cease to be at all.

Yesterday at Mme. d'Espard's you had a self-satisfied air which
disgusted me. No doubt, apparently, about your conquest! In sober
earnest, your self-possession alarms me. Not a trace in you of
the humble slave of your first letter. Far from betraying the
absent-mindedness of a lover, you polished epigrams! This is not the
attitude of a true believer, always prostrate before his divinity.

If you do not feel me to be the very breath of your life, a being nobler
than other women, and to be judged by other standards, then I must
be less than a woman in your sight. You have roused in me a spirit of
mistrust, Felipe, and its angry mutterings have drowned the accents of
tenderness. When I look back upon what has passed between us, I feel in
truth that I have a right to be suspicious. For know, Prime Minister of
all the Spains, that I have reflected much on the defenceless condition
of our sex. My innocence has held a torch, and my fingers are not burnt.
Let me repeat to you, then, what my youthful experience taught me.

In all other matters, duplicity, faithlessness, and broken pledges are
brought to book and punished; but not so with love, which is at once the
victim, the accuser, the counsel, judge, and executioner. The cruelest
treachery, the most heartless crimes, are those which remain for ever
concealed, with two hearts alone