“You gave me a far from agreeable commission,” she rejoined, “but I can refuse you nothing; I shall go to-morrow to Maisons.”

At the precise moment when this conversation was taking place, Mme. de Lorcy, who was passing the day in Paris, entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.  The exhibition of the work of a celebrated painter, recently deceased, had attracted thither a great throng of people.  Mme. de Lorcy moved to and fro, when suddenly she descried a little old woman, sixty years of age, with a snub nose, whose little gray eyes gleamed with malice and impertinence.  Her chin in the air, holding up her eye-glasses with her hand, she scrutinized all the pictures with a critical, disdainful air.

“Ah! truly it is the Princess Gulof,” said Mme. de Lorcy to herself, and turned away to avoid an encounter.  It was at Ostend, three years previous, during the season of the baths, that she had made the acquaintance of the princess; she did not care to renew it.  This haughty, capricious Russian, with whom a chance occurrence at the table d’hote had thrown her into intercourse, had not taken a place among her pleasantest reminiscences.

Princess Gulof was the wife of a governor-general whom she had wedded in second marriage after a long widowhood.  He did not see her often, two or three times a year, that was all.  Floating about from one end of Europe to another, they kept up a regular exchange of letters; the prince never took any step without consulting his wife, who usually gave him sound advice.  During the first years of their marriage, he had committed the error of being seriously in love with her:  there are some species of ugliness that inspire actually insane passions.  The princess found this in the most wretched taste, and soon brought Dimitri Paulovitch to his senses.  From that moment perfect concord reigned between this wedded couple, who were parted by the entire continent of Europe, united by the mail-bags.  The princess did not bear a very irreproachable record.  She looked upon morality as pure matter of conventionality, and she made no secret of her thoughts.  She was always on the alert for new discoveries, fresh experiences; she never waited to read a book to the end before flinging it into the waste-paper basket, most frequently the first chapter sufficed; she had met with many disappointments, she had wearied of many caprices, and she had arrived at the conclusion that man is, after all, of but small account.  Nevertheless, there had come to her late in life a comparatively lasting caprice; during nearly five years she had flattered herself that she had found what she sought.  Alas! for the first time she had been abandoned, forsaken, and that before she had herself grown tired of her fancy.  This desertion had inflicted a sharp wound on her pride; she had conceived an implacable hatred for the faithless one, and then she had forgotten him.  She had plunged into the natural sciences,