persons are surprised at the glacial insensibility under which women extinguish their loves.  But if they did not thus efface their past, their lives could have no dignity, they could never maintain themselves against the fatal familiarity to which they had once submitted.  In the entirely new situation in which Beatrix found herself, she might have evaded the alternatives presented to her by Calyste had La Palferine entered the room; but the vigilance of her old footman, Antoine, defeated her.

Hearing a carriage stop before the door, she said to Calyste, “Here come visitors!” and she rushed forward to prevent a scene.

Antoine, however, as a prudent man, had told La Palferine that Madame la marquise was out.

When Beatrix heard from the old servant who had called and the answer he had given, she replied, “Very good,” and returned to the salon, thinking:  “I will escape into a convent; I will make myself a nun.”

Calyste, meantime, had opened the window and seen his rival.

“Who came?” he said to Beatrix on her return.

“I don’t know; Antoine is still below.”

“It was La Palferine.”

“Possibly.”

“You love him, and that is why you are blaming and reproaching me; I saw him!”

“You saw him?”

“I opened the window.”

Beatrix fell half fainting on the sofa.  Then she negotiated in order to gain time; she asked to have the journey postponed for a week, under pretence of making preparations; inwardly resolving to turn Calyste off in a way that she could satisfy La Palferine,—­for such are the wretched calculations and the fiery anguish concealed with these lives which have left the rails along which the great social train rolls on.

When Calyste had left her, Beatrix felt so wretched, so profoundly humiliated, that she went to bed; she was really ill; the violent struggle which wrung her heart seemed to reach a physical reaction, and she sent for the doctor; but at the same time she despatched to La Palferine the following letter, in which she revenged herself on Calyste with a sort of rage:—­

  To Monsieur le Comte de la Palferine.

My Friend,—­Come and see me; I am in despair.  Antoine sent you away when your arrival would have put an end to one of the most horrible nightmares of my life and delivered me from a man I hate, and whom I trust never to see again.  I love you only in this world, and I can never again love any one but you, though I have the misfortune not to please you as I fain would—­

She wrote four pages which, beginning thus, ended in an exaltation too poetic for typography, in which she compromised herself so completely that the letter closed with these words:  “Am I sufficiently at your mercy?  Ah! nothing will cost me anything if it only proves to you how much you are loved.”  And she signed the letter, a thing she had never done for Conti or Calyste.