escence of her mind. She kept for a
while a profound immobility, which added to her personal attraction the
charm of things that art had created.

He asked her of what she was thinking. Escaping the magic of the blaze in
the ashes, she said:

"We will go to-morrow, if you wish, to far distant places, to the odd
districts where the poor people live. I like the old streets where misery
dwells."

He promised to satisfy her taste, although he let her know that he
thought it absurd. The walks that she led him sometimes bored him, and he
thought them dangerous. People might see them.

"And since we have been successful until now in not causing gossip--"

She shook her head.

"Do you think that people have not talked about us? Whether they know or
do not know, they talk. Not everything is known, but everything is said."

She relapsed into her dream. He thought her discontented, cross, for some
reason which she would not tell. He bent upon her beautiful, grave eyes
which reflected the light of the grate. But she reassured him.

"I do not know whether any one talks about me. And what do I care?
Nothing matters."

He left her. He was going to dine at the club, where a friend was waiting
for him. She followed him with her eyes, with peaceful sympathy. Then she
began again to read in the ashes.

She saw in them the days of her childhood; the castle wherein she had
passed the sweet, sad summers; the dark and humid park; the pond where
slept the green water; the marble nymphs under the chestnut-trees, and
the bench on which she had wept and desired death. To-day she still
ignored the cause of her youthful despair, when the ardent awakening of
her imagination threw her into a troubled maze of desires and of fears.
When she was a child, life frightened her. And now she knew that life is
not worth so much anxiety nor so much hope; that it is a very ordinary
thing. She should have known this. She thought:

"I saw mamma; she was good, very simple, and not very happy. I dreamed of
a destiny different from hers. Why? I felt around me the insipid taste of
life, and seemed to inhale the future like a salt and pungent aroma. Why?
What did I want, and what did I expect? Was I not warned enough of the
sadness of everything?"

She had been born rich, in the brilliancy of a fortune too new. She was a
daughter of that Montessuy, who, at first a clerk in a Parisian bank,
founded and governed two great establishments, brought to sustain