not love.  I have snapped the bonds of marriage in spite of the law; it was wrong, it was a crime, it was anything you like, but for me the bonds meant death.  I meant to live.  Perhaps if I had been a mother I could have endured the torture of a forced marriage of suitability.  At eighteen we scarcely know what is done with us, poor girls that we are!  I have broken the laws of the world, and the world has punished me; we both did rightly.  I sought happiness.  Is it not a law of our nature to seek for happiness?  I was young, I was beautiful . . .  I thought that I had found a nature as loving, as apparently passionate.  I was loved indeed; for a little while . . .”

She paused.

“I used to think,” she said, “that no one could leave a woman in such a position as mine.  I have been forsaken; I must have offended in some way.  Yes, in some way, no doubt, I failed to keep some law of our nature, was too loving, too devoted, too exacting—­I do not know.  Evil days have brought light with them!  For a long while I blamed another, now I am content to bear the whole blame.  At my own expense, I have absolved that other of whom I once thought I had a right to complain.  I had not the art to keep him; fate has punished me heavily for my lack of skill.  I only knew how to love; how can one keep oneself in mind when one loves?  So I was a slave when I should have sought to be a tyrant.  Those who know me may condemn me, but they will respect me too.  Pain has taught me that I must not lay myself open to this a second time.  I cannot understand how it is that I am living yet, after the anguish of that first week of the most fearful crisis in a woman’s life.  Only from three years of loneliness would it be possible to draw strength to speak of that time as I am speaking now.  Such agony, monsieur, usually ends in death; but this—­well, it was the agony of death with no tomb to end it.  Oh!  I have known pain indeed!”

The Vicomtesse raised her beautiful eyes to the ceiling; and the cornice, no doubt, received all the confidences which a stranger might not hear.  When a woman is afraid to look at her interlocutor, there is in truth no gentler, meeker, more accommodating confidant than the cornice.  The cornice is quite an institution in the boudoir; what is it but the confessional, minus the priest?

Mme. de Beauseant was eloquent and beautiful at that moment; nay, “coquettish,” if the word were not too heavy.  By justifying herself and love, she was stimulating every sentiment in the man before her; nay, more, the higher she set the goal, the more conspicuous it grew.  At last, when her eyes had lost the too eloquent expression given to them by painful memories, she let them fall on Gaston.

“You acknowledge, do you not, that I am bound to lead a solitary, self-contained life?” she said quietly.