there is in the feminine type which
I have just sketched something more shocking than immorality itself,
which, however, it is rather difficult to separate from it. And so,
notwithstanding my desire of not making myself conspicuous in anything, I
have been unable to take upon myself to join the throng of admirers whom
Madame de Palme drags after her triumphal car. I know not whether

"Le tyran dans sa cour remarqua mon absence:"

I am sometimes tempted to believe it, from the glances of astonishment and
scorn with which I am overwhelmed when we meet; but it is more simple to
attribute these hostile symptoms to the natural antipathy that separates
two creatures as dissimilar as we are. I look at her at times, myself,
with the gaping surprise which must be excited in the mind of any thinking
being by the monstrosity of such a psychological phenomenon. In that way
we are even. I ought rather to say we were even, for we are really no
longer so, since a rather cruel little adventure that happened to me last
night, and which constitutes in my account-current with Madame de Palme a
considerable advance, which she will find it difficult to make up. I have
told you that Madame de Malouet, through I know not what refinement of
Christian charity, manifested a genuine predilection for the Little
Countess. I was talking with the marquise last evening in a corner of the
drawing-room. I took the liberty of telling her that this predilection,
coming from a woman like her, was a bad example; that I had never very
well understood, for my part, that passage of the Holy Scriptures in which
the return of a single sinner is celebrated above the constant merit of a
thousand just, and that this had always appeared to me very discouraging
for the just.

"In the first place," answered Madame de Malouet, "the just do not get
discouraged; and in the next place, there are none. Do you fancy yourself
one, by chance?"

"Certainly not; I am perfectly well aware of the contrary."

"Well, then, where do you get the right of judging your neighbor so
severely?"

"I do not acknowledge Madame de Palme as my neighbor."

"That's convenient! Madame de Palme, sir, has been badly brought up, badly
married, and always spoilt; but, believe me, she is a genuine rough
diamond."

"I only see the roughness."

"And rest assured that it only requires a skillful workman--I mean a good
husband--to cut and polish it."

"Allow me to pity that future lapidary."