ston's mother, a strait-laced and virtuous
person, who had made the late Baron happy in strictly legal fashion
would never consent to meet Mme. de Beauseant. Mme. de Beauseant quite
understood that the worthy dowager must of necessity be her enemy, and
that she would try to draw Gaston from his unhallowed and immoral way of
life. The Marquise de Beauseant would willingly have sold her property
and gone back to Geneva, but she could not bring herself to do it; it
would mean that she distrusted M. de Nueil. Moreover, he had taken
a great fancy to this very Valleroy estate, where he was making
plantations and improvements. She would not deprive him of a piece of
pleasurable routine-work, such as women always wish for their husbands,
and even for their lovers.

A Mlle. de la Rodiere, twenty-two years of age, an heiress with
a rent-roll of forty thousand livres, had come to live in the
neighborhood. Gaston always met her at Manerville whenever he was
obliged to go thither. These various personages being to each other as
the terms of a proportion sum, the following letter will throw light on
the appalling problem which Mme. de Beauseant had been trying for the
past month to solve:--

"My beloved angel, it seems like nonsense, does it not, to write
to you when there is nothing to keep us apart, when a caress so
often takes the place of words, and words too are caresses? Ah,
well, no, love. There are some things that a woman cannot say when
she is face to face with the man she loves; at the bare thought of
them her voice fails her, and the blood goes back to her heart;
she has no strength, no intelligence left. It hurts me to feel
like this when you are near me, and it happens often. I feel that
my heart should be wholly sincere for you; that I should disguise
no thought, however transient, in my heart; and I love the sweet
carelessness, which suits me so well, too much to endure this
embarrassment and constraint any longer. So I will tell you about
my anguish--yes, it is anguish. Listen to me! do not begin with
the little 'Tut, tut, tut,' that you use to silence me, an
impertinence that I love, because anything from you pleases me.
Dear soul from heaven, wedded to mine, let me first tell you that
you have effaced all memory of the pain that once was crushing the
life out of me. I did not know what love was before I knew you.
Only the candor of your beautiful young life, only the purity o