You, who envy them so many things, what can I tell you that you do not know of these white sirens, impenetrable apparently but easily fathomed, who believe that love suffices love, and turn enjoyments to satiety by never varying them; whose soul has one note only, their voice one syllable—­an ocean of love in themselves, it is true, and he who has never swum there misses part of the poetry of the senses, as he who has never seen the sea has lost some strings of his lyre.  You know the why and wherefore of these words.  My relations with the Marchioness of Dudley had a disastrous celebrity.  At an age when the senses have dominion over our conduct, and when in my case they had been violently repressed by circumstances, the image of the saint bearing her slow martyrdom at Clochegourde shone so vividly before my mind that I was able to resist all seductions.  It was the lustre of this fidelity which attracted Lady Dudley’s attention.  My resistance stimulated her passion.  What she chiefly desired, like many Englishwoman, was the spice of singularity; she wanted pepper, capsicum, with her heart’s food, just as Englishmen need condiments to excite their appetite.  The dull languor forced into the lives of these women by the constant perfection of everything about them, the methodical regularity of their habits, leads them to adore the romantic and to welcome difficulty.  I was wholly unable to judge of such a character.  The more I retreated to a cold distance the more impassioned Lady Dudley became.  The struggle, in which she gloried, excited the curiosity of several persons, and this in itself was a form of happiness which to her mind made ultimate triumph obligatory.  Ah!  I might have been saved if some good friend had then repeated to me her cruel comment on my relations with Madame de Mortsauf.

“I am wearied to death,” she said, “of these turtle-dove sighings.”

Without seeking to justify my crime, I ask you to observe, Natalie, that a man has fewer means of resisting a woman than she has of escaping him.  Our code of manners forbids the brutality of repressing a woman, whereas repression with your sex is not only allurement to ours, but is imposed upon you by conventions.  With us, on the contrary, some unwritten law of masculine self-conceit ridicules a man’s modesty; we leave you the monopoly of that virtue, that you may have the privilege of granting us favors; but reverse the case, and man succumbs before sarcasm.

Though protected by my love, I was not of an age to be wholly insensible to the triple seductions of pride, devotion, and beauty.  When Arabella laid at my feet the homage of a ball-room where she reigned a queen, when she watched by glance to know if my taste approved of her dress, and when she trembled with pleasure on seeing that she pleased me, I was affected by her emotion.  Besides, she occupied a social position where I could not escape her; I could not refuse invitations in the diplomatic circle; her rank admitted her everywhere,