“Besides, you are a man,” she went on; “and I do not understand how a man can complain.  Have you not the freedom, the strength, and the right to undertake and to dare any thing?  Isn’t the world open to your activity and to your ambition?  Woman submits to her fate:  man makes his.”

This was hurting the dearest pretensions of Maxence, who seriously thought that he had exhausted the rigors of adversity.

“There are circumstances,” he began.

But she shrugged her shoulders gently, and, interrupting him,

“Do not insist,” she said, “or else I might think that you lack energy.  What are you talking of circumstances?  There are none so adverse but that can be overcome.  What would you like, then?  To be born with a hundred thousand francs a year, and have nothing to do but to live according to your whim of each day, idle, satiated, a burden upon yourself, useless, or offensive to others?  Ah!  If I were a man, I would dream of another fate.  I should like to start from the Foundling Asylum, without a name, and by my will, my intelligence, my daring, and my labor, make something and somebody of myself.  I would start from nothing, and become every thing!”

With flashing eyes and quivering nostrils, she drew herself up proudly.  But almost at once, dropping her head,

“The misfortune is,” she added, “that I am but a woman; and you who complain, if you only knew—­”

She sat down, and with her elbow on the little table, her head resting upon her hand, she remained lost in her meditations, her eyes fixed, as if following through space all the phases of the eighteen years of her life.

There is no energy but unbends at some given moment, no will but has its hour of weakness; and, strong and energetic as was Mlle. Lucienne, she had been deeply touched by Maxence’s act.  Had she, then, found at last upon her path the companion of whom she had often dreamed in the despairing hours of solitude and wretchedness?  After a few moments, she raised her head, and, looking into Maxence’s eyes with a gaze that made him quiver like the shock of an electric battery,

“Doubtless,” she said, in a tone of indifference somewhat forced, “you think you have in me a strange neighbor.  Well, as between neighbors; it is well to know each other.  Before you judge me, listen.”

The recommendation was useless.  Maxence was listening with all the powers of his attention.

“I was brought up,” she began, “in a village of the neighborhood of Paris,—­in Louveciennes.  My mother had put me out to nurse with some honest gardeners, poor, and burdened with a large family.  After two months, hearing nothing of my mother, they wrote to her:  she made no answer.  They then went to Paris, and called at the address she had given them.  She had just moved out; and no one knew what had become of her.  They could no longer, therefore, expect a single