in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases in a thousand any doubt that the hand, that spends at least a pound a day in restaurants and cabs, will succeed in gathering the muslin flower if he so wills it, and by doing so he will delight every one.  Where, then, is the struggle? where, then, is the triumph?  Therefore, I say that if a young man’s heart is not set on children, and tiresome dinner parties, the young girl presents to him no possible ideal.  But the woman of thirty presents from the outset all that is necessary to ensnare the heart of a young man.  I see her sitting in her beautiful drawing-room, all composed by, and all belonging to her.  Her chair is placed beneath an evergreen plant, and the long leaves lean out as if to touch her neck.  The great white and red roses of the d’aubusson carpet are spread enigmatically about her feline feet; a grand piano leans its melodious mouth to her; and there she sits when her visitors have left her, playing Beethoven’s sonatas in the dreamy firelight.  The spring-tide shows but a bloom of unvarying freshness; August has languished and loved in the strength of the sun.  She is stately, she is tall.  What sins, what disappointments, what aspirations lie in those grey eyes, mysteriously still, and mysteriously revealed.  These a young man longs to know of, they are his life.  He imagines himself sitting by her, when the others have gone, holding her hand, calling on her name; sometimes she moves away and plays the moonlight sonata.  Letting her hands droop upon the keys she talks sadly, maybe affectionately; she speaks of the tedium of life, of its disenchantments.  He knows well what she means, he has suffered as she has; but could he tell her, could she understand, that in his love reality would dissolve into a dream, all limitations would open into boundless infinity.

The husband he rarely sees.  Sometimes a latchkey is heard about half-past six.  The man is thick, strong, common; his jaws are heavy; his eyes are expressionless; there is about him the loud swagger of the caserne; and he suggests the inevitable question, Why did she marry him?—­a question that every young man of refined mind asks a thousand times by day and ten thousand times by night, asks till he is five-and-thirty, and sees that his generation has passed into middle age.

Why did she marry him?  Not the sea, nor the sky, nor the great mysterious midnight, when he opens his casement and gazes into starry space will give him answer; riddle that no Oedipus will ever come to unravel; this sphinx will never throw herself from the rock into the clangour of the seagulls and waves; she will never divulge her secret; and if she is the woman and not a woman of thirty, she has forgotten.