She let her hand fall along the arm of her chair, without ending her sentence, but the gesture admirably completed the speech.  She saw d’Arthez watching her flexible figure, gracefully bending in the depths of her easy-chair, noting the folds of her gown, and the pretty little ruffle which sported on her breast,—­one of those audacities of the toilet that are suited only to slender waists,—­and she resumed the thread of her thoughts as if she were speaking to herself:—­

“But I will say no more.  You writers have ended by making ridiculous all women who think they are misunderstood, or ill-mated, and who try to make themselves dramatically interesting,—­attempts which seem to me, I must say, intolerably vulgar.  There are but two things for women in that plight to do,—­yield, and all is over; resist, and amuse themselves; in either case they should keep silence.  It is true that I neither yielded wholly, nor resisted wholly; but, perhaps, that was only the more reason why I should be silent.  What folly for women to complain!  If they have not proved the stronger, they have failed in sense, in tact, in capacity, and they deserve their fate.  Are they not queens in France?  They can play with you as they like, when they like, and as much as they like.”  Here she danced her vinaigrette with an airy movement of feminine impertinence and mocking gayety.  “I have often heard miserable little specimens of my sex regretting that they were women, wishing they were men; I have always regarded them with pity.  If I had to choose, I should still elect to be a woman.  A fine pleasure, indeed, to owe one’s triumph to force, and to all those powers which you give yourselves by the laws you make!  But to see you at our feet, saying and doing foolish things,—­ah! it is an intoxicating pleasure to feel within our souls that weakness triumphs!  But when we triumph, we ought to keep silence, under pain of losing our empire.  Beaten, a woman’s pride should gag her.  The slave’s silence alarms the master.”

This chatter was uttered in a voice so softly sarcastic, so dainty, and with such coquettish motions of the head, that d’Arthez, to whom this style of woman was totally unknown, sat before her exactly like a partridge charmed by a setter.

“I entreat you, madame,” he said, at last, “to tell me how it was possible that a man could make you suffer?  Be assured that where, as you say, other women are common and vulgar, you can only seem distinguished; your manner of saying things would make a cook-book interesting.”

“You go fast in friendship,” she said, in a grave voice which made d’Arthez extremely uneasy.

The conversation changed; the hour was late, and the poor man of genius went away contrite for having seemed curious, and for wounding the sensitive heart of that rare woman who had so strangely suffered.  As for her, she had passed her life in amusing herself with men, and was another Don Juan in female attire, with this difference:  she would certainly not have invited the Commander to supper, and would have got the better of any statue.