“What an odd thing, that you should come into collision with an Esther!”

“She was handsomer than I,” said the Princess.—­“Very soon it shall be three years that I have lived in solitude,” she resumed, after a pause, “and this tranquillity has nothing painful to me about it.  To you alone can I dare to say that I feel I am happy.  I was surfeited with adoration, weary of pleasure, emotional on the surface of things, but conscious that emotion itself never reached my heart.  I have found all the men whom I have known petty, paltry, superficial; none of them ever caused me a surprise; they had no innocence, no grandeur, no delicacy.  I wish I could have met with one man able to inspire me with respect.”

“Then are you like me, my dear?” asked the marquise; “have you never felt the emotion of love while trying to love?”

“Never,” replied the princess, laying her hand on the arm of her friend.

They turned and seated themselves on a rustic bench beneath a jasmine then coming into flower.  Each had uttered one of those sayings that are solemn to women who have reached their age.

“Like you,” resumed the princess, “I have received more love than most women; but through all my many adventures, I have never found happiness.  I committed great follies, but they had an object, and that object retreated as fast as I approached it.  I feel to-day in my heart, old as it is, an innocence which has never been touched.  Yes, under all my experience, lies a first love intact,—­just as I myself, in spite of all my losses and fatigues, feel young and beautiful.  We may love and not be happy; we may be happy and never love; but to love and be happy, to unite those two immense human experiences, is a miracle.  That miracle has not taken place for me.”

“Nor for me,” said Madame d’Espard.

“I own I am pursued in this retreat by dreadful regret:  I have amused myself all through life, but I have never loved.”

“What an incredible secret!” cried the marquise.

“Ah! my dear,” replied the princess, “such secrets we can tell to ourselves, you and I, but nobody in Paris would believe us.”

“And,” said the marquise, “if we were not both over thirty-six years of age, perhaps we would not tell them to each other.”

“Yes; when women are young they have so many stupid conceits,” replied the princess.  “We are like those poor young men who play with a toothpick to pretend they have dined.”

“Well, at any rate, here we are!” said Madame d’Espard, with coquettish grace, and a charming gesture of well-informed innocence; “and, it seems to me, sufficiently alive to think of taking our revenge.”

“When you told me, the other day, that Beatrix had gone off with Conti, I thought of it all night long,” said the princess, after a pause.  “I suppose there was happiness in sacrificing her position, her future, and renouncing society forever.”