omen as these cannot but
be worshiped, for such women either love or would fain be loved. A day
comes when they make amends for all the pain they gave us; they repay
us for the pangs, the keenness of which they recognize, in joys a
hundred-fold, even as God, they tell us, recompenses our good works.
Does not their perversity spring from the strength of their feelings?
But to be so tortured by a woman, who slaughters you with indifference!
was not the suffering hideous?

"Foedora did not know it, but in that minute she trampled all my hopes
beneath her feet; she maimed my life and she blighted my future with the
cool indifference and unconscious barbarity of an inquisitive child who
plucks its wings from a butterfly.

"'Later on,' resumed Foedora, 'you will learn, I hope, the stability of
the affection that I keep for my friends. You will always find that I
have devotion and kindness for them. I would give my life to serve my
friends; but you could only despise me, if I allowed them to make love
to me without return. That is enough. You are the only man to whom I
have spoken such words as these last.'

"At first I could not speak, or master the tempest that arose within me;
but I soon repressed my emotions in the depths of my soul, and began to
smile.

"'If I own that I love you,' I said, 'you will banish me at once; if
I plead guilty to indifference, you will make me suffer for it. Women,
magistrates, and priests never quite lay the gown aside. Silence is
non-committal; be pleased then, madame, to approve my silence. You must
have feared, in some degree, to lose me, or I should not have received
this friendly admonition; and with that thought my pride ought to be
satisfied. Let us banish all personal considerations. You are perhaps
the only woman with whom I could discuss rationally a resolution so
contrary to the laws of nature. Considered with regard to your species,
you are a prodigy. Now let us investigate, in good faith, the causes of
this psychological anomaly. Does there exist in you, as in many women,
a certain pride in self, a love of your own loveliness, a refinement of
egoism which makes you shudder at the idea of belonging to another;
is it the thought of resigning your own will and submitting to a
superiority, though only of convention, which displeases you? You
would seem to me a thousand times fairer for it. Can love formerly have
brought you suffering? You probably set some value on your dainty
figu