our
conscience will be read aloud before the whole company."

But the old lady, deep in her game, paid no more heed to his quotation
than to him. He made a gesture toward her portrait.

"When that was painted, Josephine--"

Madame threw a glance after the gesture. The time was so long ago, the
mythology of Greece hardly more distant! At eighty the golden age of
youth must indeed appear an evanescent myth. Madame's ideas seemed to
take that direction.

"Ah, at that time we were all nymphs, and you all demigods."

"Demigods and nymphs, yes; but there was one among us who was a god
with you all."

The allusion--a frequent one with Mr. Horace--was to madame's husband,
who in his day, it is said, had indeed played the god in the little
Arcadia of society. She shrugged her shoulders. The truth is so little
of a compliment The old gentleman sighed in an abstracted way, and
madame, although apparently absorbed in her game, lent her ear. It is
safe to say that a woman is never too old to hear a sigh wafted in her
direction.

"Josephine, do you remember--in your memory--"

She pretended not to hear. Remember? Who ever heard of her forgetting?
But she was not the woman to say, at a moment's notice, what she
remembered or what she forgot.

"A woman's memory! When I think of a woman's memory--in fact, I do not
like to think of a woman's memory. One can intrude in imagination into
many places; but a woman's memory--"

Mr. Horace seemed to lose his thread. It had been said of him in
his youth that he wrote poetry--and it was said against him. It was
evidently such lapses as these that had given rise to the accusation.
And as there was no one less impatient under sentiment or poetry
than madame, her feet began to agitate themselves as if Jules were
perorating some of his culinary inanities before her.

"And a man's memory!" totally misunderstanding him. "It is not there
that I either would penetrate, my friend. A man--"

When madame began to talk about men she was prompted by imagination
just as much as was Mr. Horace when he talked about women. But what a
difference in their sentiments! And yet he had received so little, and
she so much, from the subjects of their inspiration. But that seems to
be the way in life--or in imagination.

"That you should"--he paused with the curious shyness of the old
before the word "love"--"that you two should--marry--seemed natural,
inevitable, at the time."

Tradition records exact