“What there is in blue eyes, light hair, and a fragile form to impress one, I cannot tell; but for us men it seems to me it is blue-eyed, light-haired, and fragile-formed women that are the hardest to forget.”

“The less easy to forget,” corrected madam.  He paid no attention to the remark.

“They are the women that attach themselves in one’s memory.  If necessary to keep from being forgotten, they come back into one’s dreams.  And as life rolls on, one wonders about them,—­’Is she happy?  Is she miserable?  Goes life well or ill with her?’”

Madame played her cards slowly, one would say, for her, prosaically.

“And there is always a pang when, as one is so wondering, the response comes,—­that is, the certainty in one’s heart responds,—­’She is miserable, and life goes ill with her.’  Then, if ever, men envy the power of God.”

Madame threw over the game she was in, and began a new one.

“Such women should not be unhappy; they are too fragile, too sensitive, too trusting.  I could never understand the infliction of misery upon them.  I could send death to them, but not—­not misfortune.”

Madame, forgetting again to cheat in time, and losing her game, began impatiently to shuffle her cards for a new deal.

“And yet, do you know, Josephine, those women are the unhappy ones of life.  They seem predestined to it, as others”—­looking at madame’s full-charmed portrait—­“are predestined to triumph and victory.  They”—­unconscious, in his abstraction, of the personal nature of his simile—­“never know how to handle their cards, and they always play a losing game.”

“Ha!” came from madame, startled into an irate ejaculation.

“It is their love always that is sacrificed, their hearts always that are bruised.  One might say that God himself favors the black-haired ones!”

As his voice sank lower and lower, the room seemed to become stiller and stiller.  A passing vehicle in the street, however, now and then drew a shiver of sound from the pendent prisms of the chandelier.

“She was so slight, so fragile, and always in white, with blue in her hair to match her eyes—­and—­God knows what in her heart, all the time.  And yet they stand it, they bear it, they do not die, they live along with the strongest, the happiest, the most fortunate of us,” bitterly; “and”—­raising his eyes to his old friend, who thereupon immediately began to fumble her cards—­“whenever in the street I see a poor, bent, broken woman’s figure, I know, without verifying it any more by a glance, that it is the wreck of a fair woman’s figure; whenever I hear of a bent, broken existence, I know, without asking any more, that it is the wreck of a fair woman’s life.”

Poor Mr. Horace spoke with the unreason of a superstitious bigot.