eed that books were male
or female, dark or fair. In _Adolphe_ women see nothing but Ellenore;
young men see only Adolphe; men of experience see Ellenore and Adolphe;
political men see the whole of social existence. You did not think it
necessary to read the soul of Adolphe--any more than your critic indeed,
who saw only Ellenore. What kills that poor fellow, my dear, is that
he has sacrificed his future for a woman; that he never can be what he
might have been--an ambassador, a minister, a chamberlain, a poet--and
rich. He gives up six years of his energy at that stage of his life when
a man is ready to submit to the hardships of any apprenticeship--to
a petticoat, which he outstrips in the career of ingratitude, for the
woman who has thrown over her first lover is certain sooner or later to
desert the second. Adolphe is, in fact, a tow-haired German, who has
not spirit enough to be false to Ellenore. There are Adolphes who spare
their Ellenores all ignominious quarreling and reproaches, who say to
themselves, 'I will not talk of what I have sacrificed; I will not for
ever be showing the stump of my wrist to let that incarnate selfishness
I have made my queen,' as Ramorny does in _The Fair Maid of Perth_. But
men like that, my dear, get cast aside.

"Adolphe is a man of birth, an aristocratic nature, who wants to get
back into the highroad to honors and recover his social birthright, his
blighted position.--You, at this moment, are playing both parts. You
are suffering from the pangs of having lost your position, and think
yourself justified in throwing over a hapless lover whose misfortune
it has been that he fancied you so far superior as to understand that,
though a man's heart ought to be true, his sex may be allowed to indulge
its caprices."

"And do you suppose that I shall not make it my business to restore to
you all you have lost by me? Be quite easy," said Madame de la Baudraye,
astounded by this attack. "Your Ellenore is not dying; and if God
gives her life, if you amend your ways, if you give up courtesans and
actresses, we will find you a better match than a Felicie Cardot."

The two lovers were sullen. Lousteau affected dejection, he aimed at
appearing hard and cold; while Dinah, really distressed, listened to the
reproaches of her heart.

"Why," said Lousteau presently, "why not end as we ought to have
begun--hide our love from all eyes, and see each other in secret?"

"Never!" cried the new-made Co