t you want to tell me. Very well,
then--yes. I would rather you should take me for a cold, insensible
woman, with no devotion in her composition, no heart even, than be
taken by everybody else for a vulgar person, and be condemned to your
so-called pleasures, of which you would most certainly tire, and to
everlasting punishment for it afterwards. Your selfish love is not worth
so many sacrifices...."

The words give but a very inadequate idea of the discourse which the
Duchess trilled out with the quick volubility of a bird-organ. Nor,
truly, was there anything to prevent her from talking on for some time
to come, for poor Armand's only reply to the torrent of flute notes was
a silence filled with cruelly painful thoughts. He was just beginning to
see that this woman was playing with him; he divined instinctively
that a devoted love, a responsive love, does not reason and count
the consequences in this way. Then, as he heard her reproach him with
detestable motives, he felt something like shame as he remembered that
unconsciously he had made those very calculations. With angelic honesty
of purpose, he looked within, and self-examination found nothing but
selfishness in all his thoughts and motives, in the answers which he
framed and could not utter. He was self-convicted. In his despair
he longed to fling himself from the window. The egoism of it was
intolerable.

What indeed can a man say when a woman will not believe in love?--Let me
prove how much I love you.--The _I_ is always there.

The heroes of the boudoir, in such circumstances, can follow the example
of the primitive logician who preceded the Pyrrhonists and denied
movement. Montriveau was not equal to this feat. With all his audacity,
he lacked this precise kind which never deserts an adept in the formulas
of feminine algebra. If so many women, and even the best of women, fall
a prey to a kind of expert to whom the vulgar give a grosser name, it is
perhaps because the said experts are great _provers_, and love, in spite
of its delicious poetry of sentiment, requires a little more geometry
than people are wont to think.

Now the Duchess and Montriveau were alike in this--they were both
equally unversed in love lore. The lady's knowledge of theory was but
scanty; in practice she knew nothing whatever; she felt nothing, and
reflected over everything. Montriveau had had but little experience, was
absolutely ignorant of theory, and felt too much to reflect at