[*] One of Alfred de Musset’s plays.

Then, clapping her hands and addressing herself to Madame Berthier, who was standing in the middle of the drawing-room, she began once more, without paying any further attention to Helene:  “Come, come; we must get on.  You don’t give sufficient point to the sentence ’To make a purse unknown to one’s husband would in the eyes of most people seem rather more than romantic.’  Say that again.”

Intensely surprised at finding her engaged in this way, Helene had sat down.  The chairs and tables had been pushed against the wall, the carpet thus being left clear.  Madame Berthier, a delicate blonde, repeated her soliloquy, with her eyes fixed on the ceiling in her effort to recall the words; while plump Madame de Guiraud, a beautiful brunette, who had assumed the character of Madame de Lery, reclined in an arm-chair awaiting her cue.  The ladies, in their unpretentious morning gowns, had doffed neither bonnets nor gloves.  Seated in front of them, her hair in disorder and a volume of Musset in her hand, was Juliette, in a dressing-gown of white cashmere.  Her face wore the serious expression of a stage-manager tutoring his actors as to the tones they should speak in and the by-play they should introduce.  The day being dull, the small curtains of embroidered tulle had been pulled aside and swung across the knobs of the window-fastenings, so that the garden could be seen, dark and damp.

“You don’t display sufficient emotion,” declared Juliette.  “Put a little more meaning into it.  Every word ought to tell.  Begin again:  ‘I’m going to finish your toilette, my dear little purse.’”

“I shall be an awful failure,” said Madame Berthier languidly.  “Why don’t you play the part instead of me?  You would make a delicious Mathilda.”

“I!  Oh, no!  In the first place, one needs to be fair.  Besides, I’m a very good teacher, but a bad pupil.  But let us get on—­let us get on!”

Helene sat still in her corner.  Madame Berthier, engrossed in her part, had not even turned round.  Madame de Guiraud had merely honored her with a slight nod.  She realized that she was in the way, and that she ought to have declined to stay.  If she still remained, it was no longer through the sense of a duty to be fulfilled, but rather by reason of a strange feeling stirring vaguely in her heart’s depth’s—­a feeling which had previously thrilled her in this selfsame spot.  The unkindly greeting which Juliette had bestowed on her pained her.  However, the young woman’s friendships were usually capricious; she worshipped people for three months, threw herself on their necks, and seemed to live for them alone; then one morning, without affording any explanation, she appeared to lose all consciousness of being acquainted with them.  Without doubt, in this, as in everything else, she was simply yielding to a fashionable craze, an inclination to love the people who were loved by her own circle.  These sudden veerings of affection, however, deeply wounded Helene, for her generous and undemonstrative heart had its ideal in eternity.  She often left the Deberles plunged in sadness, full of despair when she thought how fragile and unstable was the basis of human love.  And on this occasion, in this crisis in her life, the thought brought her still keener pain.