bestow, offered these to me with childlike effusiveness and
such compassion as would inevitably have filled with bitterness any
profligate who should have fallen in love with her; for, alas, it was
all charity, all sheer pity. Her renunciation of love, her dread of what
is called happiness for women, she proclaimed with equal vehemence and
candor. These happy days proved to me that a woman's friendship is far
superior to her love.

"I suffered the revelations of my sorrows to be dragged from me with as
many grimaces as a young lady allows herself before sitting down to the
piano, so conscious are they of the annoyance that will follow. As
you may imagine, the necessity for overcoming my dislike to speak had
induced the Countess to strengthen the bonds of our intimacy; but she
found in me so exact a counterpart of her own antipathy to love, that
I fancied she was well content with the chance which had brought to her
desert island a sort of Man Friday. Solitude was perhaps beginning to
weigh on her. At the same time, there was nothing of the coquette in
her; nothing survived of the woman; she did not feel that she had a
heart, she told me, excepting in the ideal world where she found refuge.
I involuntarily compared these two lives--hers and the Count's:--his,
all activity, agitation, and emotion; hers, all inaction, quiescence,
and stagnation. The woman and the man were admirably obedient to their
nature. My misanthropy allowed me to utter cynical sallies against men
and women both, and I indulged in them, hoping to bring Honorine to
the confidential point; but she was not to be caught in any trap, and I
began to understand that mulish obstinacy which is commoner among women
than is generally supposed.

"'The Orientals are right,' I said to her one evening, 'when they shut
you up and regard you merely as the playthings of their pleasure. Europe
has been well punished for having admitted you to form an element of
society and for accepting you on an equal footing. In my opinion, woman
is the most dishonorable and cowardly being to be found. Nay, and that
is where her charm lies. Where would be the pleasure of hunting a tame
thing? When once a woman has inspired a man's passion, she is to him
for ever sacred; in his eyes she is hedged round by an imprescriptible
prerogative. In men gratitude for past delights is eternal. Though he
should find his mistress grown old or unworthy, the woman still has
rights over his heart; bu