n, for this is
the time when she receives her own visitors, and often there is a numerous
company.

Oh, be reassured: these guests will not be able to compromise her; they are
secret, silent and invisible for all else but her; she alone sees them,
talks to them and listens to them.

It is at the summons of her thought that they hasten there, passive and
obedient. Then she passes them in review one by one; she examines them from
head to foot, she clothes and unclothes them at her will; never has a
Captain of infantry, under orders for parade, made a more minute inspection
of his conscripts.

Sometimes they come all in a crowd, giving themselves up with her, in the
mysterious comers of her imagination, to the wildest frolics. Young people
with a stiff collar, beardless sublieutenants, coxcombs with red hands,
swells with white cuffs, little heads of wax and little souls of cardboard,
run up, ran up, ye pretty puppets.

Dance my loves
You are but dolls.

And she makes them dance on every cord and every tune.

But soon the figures are effaced and blend into one. The pomatumed band
disappear into space, whence there rises clearly the image of the chosen
one.

He is young, he is dark or fair: she has seen him to-day; she looked at
him, he smiled at her, he thinks her pretty.

Is she then always pretty? And quickly she goes to her mirror. Heavens! how
badly her hair is done. How badly that ribbon sets! If she had put it in
another place? And that little wandering lock; decidedly it must set off
that. "Perhaps he would like me better if, instead of plaits, I had curls,
and if instead of the brown dress, I put on the blue?"

He. Who is he? He is the imaginary lover, the handsome young man whom she
has met in the street, he who turned round to look at her, or the one who
was so charming at the last ball, or again the one who has just passed the
window.

Who is he? Does she know? It is the one she is waiting for. The first who
presents himself who is _handsome, young, intelligent and rich_. What does
the rest matter provided he possesses all these qualities, and all these
qualities he must possess.

Often she has never even seen him, but he is charming, and she feels that
she loves him already.

And there are the brilliant displays of the future appearing, the enchanted
palaces which are built out of the chapters of novels which never will be
finished.

And thus every evening--wild adventures in the young bra