h to pay for everything they get ruined, like the
fools they are, and go and get killed in Africa, after leaving a hundred
thousand francs of debt in Paris. Do you think a woman is grateful
to them for it? Far from it. She declares that she has sacrificed her
position for them, and that while she was with them she was losing
money. These details seem to you shocking? Well, they are true. You are
a very nice fellow; I like you very much. I have lived with these women
for twenty years; I know what they are worth, and I don't want to see
you take the caprice that a pretty girl has for you too seriously.

"Then, besides that," continued Prudence; "admit that Marguerite loves
you enough to give up the count or the duke, in case one of them were to
discover your liaison and to tell her to choose between him and you,
the sacrifice that she would make for you would be enormous, you can not
deny it. What equal sacrifice could you make for her, on your part, and
when you had got tired of her, what could you do to make up for what you
had taken from her? Nothing. You would have cut her off from the world
in which her fortune and her future were to be found; she would have
given you her best years, and she would be forgotten. Either you would
be an ordinary man, and, casting her past in her teeth, you would leave
her, telling her that you were only doing like her other lovers, and you
would abandon her to certain misery; or you would be an honest man, and,
feeling bound to keep her by you, you would bring inevitable trouble
upon yourself, for a liaison which is excusable in a young man, is no
longer excusable in a man of middle age. It becomes an obstacle to every
thing; it allows neither family nor ambition, man's second and last
loves. Believe me, then, my friend, take things for what they are worth,
and do not give a kept woman the right to call herself your creditor, no
matter in what."

It was well argued, with a logic of which I should have thought Prudence
incapable. I had nothing to reply, except that she was right; I took her
hand and thanked her for her counsels.

"Come, come," said she, "put these foolish theories to flight, and
laugh over them. Life is pleasant, my dear fellow; it all depends on the
colour of the glass through which one sees it. Ask your friend Gaston;
there's a man who seems to me to understand love as I understand it. All
that you need think of, unless you are quite a fool, is that close by
there is