“What! she was there!”

“Of course she was.  She heard us, and, what’s more, she could see us.  I made all the signs I could, but you were off!”

I remained somewhat embarrassed.  I regretted the harshness of my words; for, in attacking so violently this young person, I had yielded to the excitement of controversy much more than to a sentiment of serious animadversion.  In point of fact, she is indifferent to me, but it’s a little too much to hear her praised.

“And now what am I to do?” I said to Madame de Malouet.

She reflected for a moment, and replied with a slight shrug of her shoulders: 

“Ma foi! nothing; that’s the best thing you can do.”

The least breath causes a full cup to overflow; thus the little unpleasantness of this scene seems to have intensified this feeling of ennui which has scarce left me since my advent into this abode of joy.  This continuous gayety, this restless agitation, this racing and dancing and dining, this ceaseless merry-making, and this eternal round of festivity importune me to the point of disgust.  I regret bitterly the time I have wasted in reading and investigations which in no wise concern my official mission and have but little advanced its termination; I regret the engagements which the kind entreaties of my hosts have extorted from my weakness; I regret my vale of Tempe; above all, Paul, I regret you.  There are certainly in this little social center a sufficient number of superior and kindly disposed minds to form the elements of the pleasantest and even the most elevated relations; but these elements are fairly submerged in the worldly and vulgar throng, and can only be eliminated from it with much trouble and difficulty, and never without admixture.  Monsieur and Madame de Malouet, Monsieur de Breuilly even, when his insane jealously does not deprive him of the use of his faculties, certainly possess choice minds and hearts; but the mere difference of age opens an abyss between us.  As to the young men and the men of my own age whom I meet here, they all march with more or less eager step in Madame de Palme’s wake.  It is enough that I should decline to follow them in that path, to cause them to manifest toward me a coolness akin to antipathy.  My pride does not attempt to break that ice, though two or three among them appear well gifted, and reveal instincts superior to the life they have adopted.

There is one question I sometimes ask of myself on that subject; are we any better, you and I, youthful Paul, than this crowd of joyous companions and pleasant viveurs, or are we simply different from them?  Like ourselves, they possess honesty and honor; like ourselves, they have neither virtue nor religion properly so-called.  So far, we are equal.  Our tastes alone and our pleasures differ; all their preoccupations turn to the lighter ways of the world, to the cares of gallantry and material activity; ours are almost