“One cannot tell.  It seems so at the time.  We like to think it so; it makes it easier.  And yet, looking back on our future as we once looked forward to it—­”

“Eh! but who wants to look back on it, my friend?  Who in the world wants to look back on it?” One could not doubt madame’s energy of opinion on that question to hear her voice.  “We have done our future, we have performed it, if you will.  Our future!  It is like the dinners we have eaten; of course we cannot remember the good without becoming exasperated over the bad:  but”—­shrugging her shoulders—­“since we cannot beat the cooks, we must submit to fate,” forcing a queen that she needed at the critical point of her game.

“At sixteen and twenty-one it is hard to realize that one is arranging one’s life to last until sixty, seventy, forever,” correcting himself as he thought of his friend, the dead husband.  If madame had ever possessed the art of self-control, it was many a long day since she had exercised it; now she frankly began to show ennui.

“When I look back to that time,”—­Mr. Horace leaned back in his chair and half closed his eyes, perhaps to avoid the expression of her face,—­“I see nothing but lights and flowers, I hear nothing but music and laughter; and all—­lights and flowers and music and laughter—­seem to meet in this room, where we met so often to arrange our—­inevitabilities.”  The word appeared to attract him.  “Josephine,”—­with a sudden change of voice and manner,—­“Josephine, how beautiful you were!”

The old lady nodded her head without looking from her cards.

“They used to say,” with sad conviction of the truth of his testimony—­“the men used to say that your beauty was irresistible.  None ever withstood you.  None ever could.”

That, after all, was Mr. Horace’s great charm with madame; he was so faithful to the illusions of his youth.  As he looked now at her, one could almost feel the irresistibility of which he spoke.

“It was only their excuse, perhaps; we could not tell at the time; we cannot tell even now when we think about it.  They said then, talking as men talk over such things, that you were the only one who could remain yourself under the circumstances; you were the only one who could know, who could will, under the circumstances.  It was their theory; men can have only theories about such things.”  His voice dropped, and he seemed to drop too, into some abysm of thought.

Madame looked into the mirror, where she could see the face of the one who alone could retain her presence of mind under the circumstances suggested by Mr. Horace.  She could also have seen, had she wished it, among the reflected bric-a-brac of the mantel, the corner of the frame that held the picture of her husband, but peradventure, classing it with the past which held so many unavenged bad dinners, she never thought to link it even by a look with her emotions of the present.  Indeed, it had been said of her that in past, present, and future there had ever been but the one picture to interest her eyes—­the one she was looking at now.  This, however, was the remark of the uninitiated, for the true passion of a beautiful woman is never so much for her beauty as for its booty; as the passion of a gamester is for his game, not for his luck.