her hand.  She pretended to befriend you, for even so young, you promised to have power by your charms, renewing those she had never forgotten in her lost Iza.  No one consulted the Almanack de Gotha when you were launched on an admiring society as one of the Vieradlers.  You soon won a great reputation for freshness of wit and coquetry in all South Germany.  In plain words, you could not see a man come into the drawing-room without wishing to make him fall in love with you.  We want to monopolize genius—­you to monopolize the love of man.  You have the mania of loving, more common than it is suspected, especially by those who would have us believe that good society is a fold where snowy lambs are led about from the cradle to the butcher’s shambles, by pastors carrying crooks decked with sky blue ribbons.  The feeling is a craving in you—­an involuntary and invincible instinct which was to have its inevitable end.  You turned from a man who sincerely loved you to make a conquest of another whose heart was engaged.”

“Stop!” interrupted Cesarine, triumphantly for she had detected genuine feeling the last tone used by the living enigma.  “I know you now! you are the man whom you say really loved me.  Down with the masks!  You are—­”

“Not so loud!”

“You are Major von Sendlingen!”

“Say ‘Colonel’ and you will be exact.  Yes; I am the lover whom you cast off in favor of the student Ruprecht, as this Clemenceau was called when he pottered about Europe, sketching ruined doorways and broken windows and dreamed of architectural structures.  A man whom destiny had chosen to be the greatest demolisher of the age! what sarcasm!”

“Well, you should be the last to complain!  Was it like devotion to me that you should try to abduct La Belle Stamboulane in the public street?

“To remove her from your path!  She was your rival in the music hall!  Love her, love a Jewess?  You do not understand men—­you fancy they are put here for your pleasure, safeguard and redemption.  An error!  We are neither your joy or your punishment.  Let that pass.  You married the student Ruprecht who turned out to be your cousin Felix Clemenceau.  For a time you played the part of the idolizing young wife admirably.  You never reproached his father’s head for the murder of your aunt and he said never a word about the old beggar-sovereign Baboushka.  In your gladness at having stolen the man away from Fraulein Daniels, I believe you imagined that it was love you felt.  Not a bit of it!  Love is the sun of the soul—­all light, heat, motion and creativeness! there are no more two loves than two suns.  There may be two or many passions, but not two loves.  If a man loved twice, it would not be love!”

The hard man spoke so tenderly that his hearer dared not scoff.

“He ran through your witchery after a while, but he built his hopes upon maternity.  You had a child but you connived at its death, if you did not deal the stroke.”