are
wasting your affections on her when they might be much better employed
elsewhere. I could have told you of half a score of women in the
financial world, any one of them a thousand times better worth your
while than that titled courtesan, who does with her brains what less
artificial women do with----"

"What is this, my dear fellow?" Armand broke in. "The Duchess is an
angel of innocence."

Ronquerolles began to laugh.

"Things being thus, dear boy," said he, "it is my duty to enlighten you.
Just a word; there is no harm in it between ourselves. Has the Duchess
surrendered? If so, I have nothing more to say. Come, give me your
confidence. There is no occasion to waste your time in grafting
your great nature on that unthankful stock, when all your hopes and
cultivation will come to nothing."

Armand ingenuously made a kind of general report of his position,
enumerating with much minuteness the slender rights so hardly won.
Ronquerolles burst into a peal of laughter so heartless, that it would
have cost any other man his life. But from their manner of speaking and
looking at each other during that colloquy beneath the wall, in a corner
almost as remote from intrusion as the desert itself, it was easy to
imagine the friendship between the two men knew no bounds, and that no
power on earth could estrange them.

"My dear Armand, why did you not tell me that the Duchess was a puzzle
to you? I would have given you a little advice which might have brought
your flirtation properly through. You must know, to begin with, that the
women of our Faubourg, like any other women, love to steep themselves in
love; but they have a mind to possess and not to be possessed. They have
made a sort of compromise with human nature. The code of their parish
gives them a pretty wide latitude short of the last transgression. The
sweets enjoyed by this fair Duchess of yours are so many venial sins
to be washed away in the waters of penitence. But if you had the
impertinence to ask in earnest for the moral sin to which naturally
you are sure to attach the highest importance, you would see the deep
disdain with which the door of the boudoir and the house would be
incontinently shut upon you. The tender Antoinette would dismiss
everything from her memory; you would be less than a cipher for her.
She would wipe away your kisses, my dear friend, as indifferently as she
would perform her ablutions. She would sponge love from her cheeks as
she