“Ah!” rejoined Madame de Palme.  And suddenly pointing me out with her finger:  “You perhaps prefer this gentleman, who also writes poetry?”

“No, madam,” I said, “it is a mistake; I write none.”

“Ah!  I thought you did.  I beg your pardon.”

Madame Durmaitre, who doubtless owes the unalterable serenity of her soul to the consciousness of her supreme beauty, had been content with smiling with disdainful nonchalance.  She dropped into the arm-chair, which I had given up to her.

“What gloomy weather!” she said to me; “really, this autumnal sky weighs upon the soul.  I was looking out of the window; all the trees look like cypress-trees, and the whole country looks like a graveyard.  It would really seem that——­”

“No, ah! no.  I beg of you, Nathalie,” interrupted Madame de Palme, “say no more.  That’s enough fun before breakfast.  You’ll make yourself sick.”

“Well, now! my dear Bathilde, you must really have slept very badly last night,” said the beautiful widow.

“I, my dear? ah! do not say that.  I had celestial, ecstatic dreams; ecstasies, you know.  My soul held converse with other souls—­like your own soul.  Angels smiled at me through the foliage of the cypress-trees—­and so forth, and so forth!”

Madame Durmaitre blushed slightly, shrugged her shoulders, and took up the review I had laid upon the mantel-piece.

“By the bye, Nathalie,” resumed Madame de Palme, “do you know who we are going to have at dinner to-day, in the way of men?” The good-natured Nathalie mentioned Monsieur de Breuilly, two or three other married gentlemen, and the parish priest.

“Then I am going away after breakfast,” said the Little Countess, looking at me.

“That’s very polite to us,” murmured Madame Durmaitre.

“You know,” replied the other with imperturbable assurance, “that I only like men’s society, and there are three classes of individuals whom I do not consider as belonging to that sex, or to any other; those are married men, priests, and savants.”

As she concluded this sentence, Madame de Palme cast another glance at me, by which however, I had no need to understand that she included me in her classification of neutral species; it could only be among the individuals of the third category, though I have no claim to it whatever; but it does not require much to be considered a savant by the ladies.

Almost at this very moment, the breakfast-bell rang in the court-yard of the chateau, and she added: 

“Ah! there’s breakfast, thank Heaven! for I am develish hungry, with all respect for pure spirits and troubled souls.”

She then ran and skipped to the other end of the parlor to greet Monsieur de Malouet, who was coming in followed by his guests.  As to myself, I promptly offered my arm to Madame Durmaitre, and I endeavored by earnest attentions, to make her forget the storm which the mere shade of sympathy she manifests toward me had just attracted upon her.