who is very beautiful or very good, solves completely the problem of which we, with all our hard-headedness, make such a hash.  We are mere children or pedants compared to her.  I as yet understood this only vaguely, though I saw clearly enough that beauty is so great a gift that talent, genius, and even virtue are nothing when weighed in the balance with it; so that the woman who is really beautiful has the right to hold herself superior to everybody and everything, inasmuch as she combines not in a creation outside of herself, but in her very person, as in a Myrrhine vase, all the qualities which genius painfully endeavours to reproduce.

Among these, my companions, there was, as I have said, one to whom I was particularly attached Her name was Noemi, and she was quite a model of good conduct and grace.  Her eyes had a languid look which denoted at once good-nature and quickness; her hair was beautifully fair.  She was about two years my senior, and she treated me partly as an elder sister, partly with the confidential affection of one child for another.  We got on very well together, and while our friends were constantly falling out, we were always of one mind.  I tried to make these quarrels up, but she never thought that I should be successful, and would tell me that it was hopeless to try and make everybody agree.  These attempts at mediation, which gave us an imperceptible superiority over the other children, formed a very pleasing tie between us.  Even now I cannot hear “Nous n’irons plus an bois,” or “Il pleut, il pleut, bergere” without my heart beating rather more quickly than is its wont.  There can be no doubt that but for the fatal vice which held me fast, I should have been in love with Noemi two or three years later; but I was a slave to reasoning, and my whole time was devoted to religious dialectics.  The flow of abstractions which rushed to the head made me giddy, and caused me to be absent-minded and oblivious of all else.

This budding affection was, moreover, turned from its course by a peculiar defect which, has more than once been injurious to my prospects in life.  This is my indecision of character, which often leads me into positions from which I have great difficulty in extricating myself.  This defect was further complicated in this particular case by a good quality which has led me into as many difficulties as the most serious of defects.  There was among these children a little girl though much less pretty than Noemi, who, gentle and amiable as she was, did not get nearly so much notice taken of her.  She was even fonder of making me her companion than Noemi, of whom she was rather jealous.  I have never been able to do a thing which would give pain to any one.  I had a vague sort of idea that a woman who was not very pretty must be unhappy and feel the inward pang of having missed her fate.  I was oftener, therefore, with her than with Noemi, because I saw that she was melancholy.  So I allowed my first love to go off at a tangent, just as, later in life, I did in politics, and in a very bungling sort of way.  Once or twice I noticed Noemi laughing to herself at my simple folly.  She was always nice with me, but at times her manner was slightly sarcastic, and this tinge of irony, which she made no attempt to conceal, only rendered her more charming in my eyes.