put my questions bluntly, the circumstances
don't permit of sparing either your feelings or my own--isn't it true
that for two or three years before your husband's death your name in
Paris was nothing short of a byword?"

"I'm not sure of what you mean by a byword. I acknowledge that I braved
public opinion, and that much ill was said of me--often, more than I
deserved."

"Isn't it true that your name was connected with that of a man called
Lalanne, and that he was killed in a duel on your account?"

"It's true that Monsieur Lalanne made love to me; it's also true that he
was killed in a duel; but it's not true that it was on my account. The
instance is an excellent illustration of the degree to which the true
and the false are mixed in Parisian gossip--perhaps in all gossip--and a
woman's reputation blasted. Unhappily for me, I felt myself young and
strong enough to be indifferent to reputation. I treated it with the
neglect one often bestows upon one's health--not thinking that there
would come a day of reckoning."

"If there had been only one such case it might have been allowed to
pass; but what do you say of De Cretteville? what of De Melcourt? what
of Lord Wendover?"

"I have nothing to say but this: that for such scandal I've a rule, from
which I have no intention of departing even now: I neither tell it, nor
listen to it, nor contradict it. If it pleases the Marquis de Bienville
to repeat it, and you to give it credence, I can't stoop to correct it,
even in my own defence."

"God knows I'm not delving into scandal, Diane. If I bring up these
miserable names, it's only that you may have the opportunity to right
yourself."

"It's an opportunity impossible for me to use. If I were to attempt to
unravel the strand of truth from the web of falsehood, it would end in
your condemning me the more. The canons of conduct in France are so
different from those in America that what is permissible in one country
is heinous in the other. In the same way that your young girls shock our
conceptions of propriety, our married women shock yours. It would be
useless to defend myself in your eyes, because I should be appealing to
a standard to which I was never taught to conform."

"I thought I had taken that into consideration. I'm not entirely
ignorant of the conditions under which you've lived, and I meant to have
allowed for them. But isn't it true that you exceeded the very wide
latitude recognized by public opinion,