she, "I hear these opinions not for the first time,
and they give me such pain!"

She clasped her hands.

"Love, sympathy, when a choice is made--"

The voice broke in her throat all at once. Her eyelids drooped;
her shoulders fell back on the chair; she was silent.

Irene laughed and made a gesture of despair with her hands.

"What can I do with the situation?" began she in a jesting tone.
"It was not I who made this world, and cannot reconstruct it. I
might like to do so, perhaps, but I cannot." Then she grew
serious, and continued: "Love and sympathy may be very charming.
I admit even that most assuredly they are when they exist; but
usually if they exist it is for a short period, they flash up and
quench--a few years, a few days, most frequently only days, and
they pass--they are as if they had never been. Why illusions,
when after them disenchantment must conic? They merely cause
useless exertion in life, disappointment, and suffering."

Irene's words and sententious, hard tones were in marvellous
contrast with the maiden-roundness of her arms, which were bare
in the broad sleeves of her dressing-gown, with the fresh red of
her delicate lips, and the gleam of her blue eyes.

"Besides," added she, "I feel a sympathy for the baron; a certain
kind of sympathy." Malvina, after a moment's silence, asked in a
low voice:

"What kind of sympathy is it?"

After a little hesitation Irene answered with a harsh, abrupt
laugh:

"What kind of sympathy? A kind very common, it seems known
universally. Sometimes his way of looking at me, or his pressure
of the hand, moves me. But he pleases me most by his sincerity;
he makes no pretence. He has never told me, like those three or
four other suitors of mine, that he loves me. He has for me, as I
have for him, a certain kind of sympathy; he considers me
financially an excellent match, and for these two reasons he
wishes to share with me his title of baron, and his relationship
with certain families of counts and princes. And as I, on my
part, need independence at the earliest, and my own house, so one
thing for another, the exchange of services and interests is
accomplished. We do not hide from each other these motives of
ours, and this creates between us sincere and comrade-like
relations, quite agreeable, and leading to no tirades or elegies
in which there is not one bit of truth, or to any exaltation or
despair which has no title to the future. This is all."

"Ira