Langeais really carried away by his talk, or had she
devised this charming piece of coquetry? At any rate, she looked up
mischievously as the clock struck twelve.

"Ah! you have made me too late for the ball!" she exclaimed, surprised
and vexed that she had forgotten how time was going.

The next moment she approved the exchange of pleasures with a smile that
made Armand's heart give a sudden leap.

"I certainly promised Mme de Beauseant," she added. "They are all
expecting me."

"Very well--go."

"No--go on. I will stay. Your Eastern adventures fascinate me. Tell
me the whole story of your life. I love to share in a brave man's
hardships, and I feel them all, indeed I do!"

She was playing with her scarf, twisting it and pulling it to
pieces, with jerky, impatient movements that seemed to tell of inward
dissatisfaction and deep reflection.

"_We_ are fit for nothing," she went on. "Ah! we are contemptible,
selfish, frivolous creatures. We can bore ourselves with amusements,
and that is all we can do. Not one of us that understands that she has
a part to play in life. In old days in France, women were beneficent
lights; they lived to comfort those that mourned, to encourage high
virtues, to reward artists and stir new life with noble thoughts. If the
world has grown so petty, ours is the fault. You make me loathe the ball
and this world in which I live. No, I am not giving up much for you."

She had plucked her scarf to pieces, as a child plays with a flower,
pulling away all the petals one by one; and now she crushed it into a
ball, and flung it away. She could show her swan's neck.

She rang the bell. "I shall not go out tonight," she told the footman.
Her long, blue eyes turned timidly to Armand; and by the look of
misgiving in them, he knew that he was meant to take the order for a
confession, for a first and great favour. There was a pause, filled with
many thoughts, before she spoke with that tenderness which is often in
women's voices, and not so often in their hearts. "You have had a hard
life," she said.

"No," returned Armand. "Until today I did not know what happiness was."

"Then you know it now?" she asked, looking at him with a demure, keen
glance.

"What is happiness for me henceforth but this--to see you, to hear
you?... Until now I have only known privation; now I know that I can be
unhappy----"

"That will do, that will do," she said. "You must go; it is past
midnight. Let us regard ap