"but is it nothing to be conscious of
admiration and flattery; to triumph over other women, even over the most
virtuous, humiliating them before our beauty and our splendor? Not only
so; one day of our life is worth ten years of a bourgeoise existence,
and so it is all summed up."

"Is not a woman hateful without virtue?" Emile said to Raphael.

Euphrasia's glance was like a viper's, as she said, with an irony in her
voice that cannot be rendered:

"Virtue! we leave that to deformity and to ugly women. What would the
poor things be without it?"

"Hush, be quiet," Emile broke in. "Don't talk about something you have
never known."

"That I have never known!" Euphrasia answered. "You give yourself for
life to some person you abominate; you must bring up children who will
neglect you, who wound your very heart, and you must say, 'Thank you!'
for it; and these are the virtues you prescribe to woman. And that is
not enough. By way of requiting her self-denial, you must come and
add to her sorrows by trying to lead her astray; and though you are
rebuffed, she is compromised. A nice life! How far better to keep one's
freedom, to follow one's inclinations in love, and die young!"

"Have you no fear of the price to be paid some day for all this?"

"Even then," she said, "instead of mingling pleasures and troubles, my
life will consist of two separate parts--a youth of happiness is secure,
and there may come a hazy, uncertain old age, during which I can suffer
at my leisure."

"She has never loved," came in the deep tones of Aquilina's voice. "She
never went a hundred leagues to drink in one look and a denial with
untold raptures. She has not hung her own life on a thread, nor tried
to stab more than one man to save her sovereign lord, her king, her
divinity.... Love, for her, meant a fascinating colonel."

"Here she is with her La Rochelle," Euphrasia made answer. "Love comes
like the wind, no one knows whence. And, for that matter, if one of
those brutes had once fallen in love with you, you would hold sensible
men in horror."

"Brutes are put out of the question by the Code," said the tall,
sarcastic Aquilina.

"I thought you had more kindness for the army," laughed Euphrasia.

"How happy they are in their power of dethroning their reason in this
way," Raphael exclaimed.

"Happy?" asked Aquilina, with dreadful look, and a smile full of pity
and terror. "Ah, you do not know what it is to be condemned to a life of