d'Aquin, with a pink scarf, my father will be in
a better temper.--You will find an answer stuck to the back of the chair
you are sitting in; it will comfort you perhaps for not seeing me. Put
the note you have brought under my handkerchief----"

This young person was evidently more than seven-and-twenty.

Lucien took a cab in the Rue de la Planche, got out of it on the
Boulevards, took another by the Madeleine, and desired the driver to
have the gates opened and drive in at the house in the Rue Taitbout.

On going in at eleven o'clock, he found Esther in tears, but dressed as
she was wont to dress to do him honor. She awaited her Lucien reclining
on a sofa covered with white satin brocaded with yellow flowers, dressed
in a bewitching wrapper of India muslin with cherry-colored bows;
without her stays, her hair simply twisted into a knot, her feet in
little velvet slippers lined with cherry-colored satin; all the candles
were burning, the hookah was prepared. But she had not smoked her own,
which stood beside her unlighted, emblematical of her loneliness. On
hearing the doors open she sprang up like a gazelle, and threw her arms
round Lucien, wrapping him like a web caught by the wind and flung about
a tree.

"Parted.--Is it true?"

"Oh, just for a few days," replied Lucien.

Esther released him, and fell back on her divan like a dead thing.

In these circumstances, most women babble like parrots. Oh! how they
love! At the end of five years they feel as if their first happiness
were a thing of yesterday, they cannot give you up, they are magnificent
in their indignation, despair, love, grief, dread, dejection,
presentiments. In short, they are as sublime as a scene from
Shakespeare. But make no mistake! These women do not love. When they are
really all that they profess, when they love truly, they do as Esther
did, as children do, as true love does; Esther did not say a word, she
lay with her face buried in the pillows, shedding bitter tears.

Lucien, on his part, tried to lift her up, and spoke to her.

"But, my child, we are not to part. What, after four years of happiness,
is this the way you take a short absence.--What on earth do I do to all
these girls?" he added to himself, remembering that Coralie had loved
him thus.

"Ah, monsieur, you are so handsome," said Europe.

The senses have their own ideal. When added to this fascinating beauty
we find the sweetness of nature, the poetry, that character