he freedom, the strength, and the
right to undertake and to dare any thing? Isn't the world open to
your activity and to your ambition? Woman submits to her fate: man
makes his."

This was hurting the dearest pretensions of Maxence, who seriously
thought that he had exhausted the rigors of adversity.

"There are circumstances," he began.

But she shrugged her shoulders gently, and, interrupting him,

"Do not insist," she said, "or else I might think that you lack
energy. What are you talking of circumstances? There are none
so adverse but that can be overcome. What would you like, then?
To be born with a hundred thousand francs a year, and have nothing
to do but to live according to your whim of each day, idle, satiated,
a burden upon yourself, useless, or offensive to others? Ah! If I
were a man, I would dream of another fate. I should like to start
from the Foundling Asylum, without a name, and by my will, my
intelligence, my daring, and my labor, make something and somebody
of myself. I would start from nothing, and become every thing!"

With flashing eyes and quivering nostrils, she drew herself up
proudly. But almost at once, dropping her head,

"The misfortune is," she added, "that I am but a woman; and you who
complain, if you only knew--"

She sat down, and with her elbow on the little table, her head
resting upon her hand, she remained lost in her meditations, her
eyes fixed, as if following through space all the phases of the
eighteen years of her life.

There is no energy but unbends at some given moment, no will but
has its hour of weakness; and, strong and energetic as was Mlle.
Lucienne, she had been deeply touched by Maxence's act. Had she,
then, found at last upon her path the companion of whom she had
often dreamed in the despairing hours of solitude and wretchedness?
After a few moments, she raised her head, and, looking into
Maxence's eyes with a gaze that made him quiver like the shock of
an electric battery,

"Doubtless," she said, in a tone of indifference somewhat forced,
"you think you have in me a strange neighbor. Well, as between
neighbors; it is well to know each other. Before you judge me,
listen."

The recommendation was useless. Maxence was listening with all
the powers of his attention.

"I was brought up," she began, "in a village of the neighborhood of
Paris,--in Louveciennes. My mother had put me out to nurse with
some honest gardeners, poor, and burdened