“You are right to think so, dearest, but my position is very different from yours.  You have not another lover; you could not have another; but I being free and unable to see you, have not found it possible to resist the charms of M——­ M——.  I love her madly; she knows it, and, intelligent as she is, she must have meant to shew her contempt for me by doing what she has done.  I candidly confess that I feel hurt in the highest degree.  If she loved me as I love her, she never could have sent you here instead of coming herself.”

“I do not think so, my beloved friend.  Her soul is as noble as her heart is generous; and just in the same manner that I am not sorry to know that you love one another and that you make each other happy, as this beautiful casino proves to me, she does not regret our love, and she is, on the contrary, delighted to shew us that she approves of it.  Most likely she meant to prove that she loved you for your own sake, that your happiness makes her happy, and that she is not jealous of her best friend being her rival.  To convince you that you ought not to be angry with her for having discovered our secret, she proves, by sending me here in her place, that she is pleased to see your heart divided between her and me.  You know very well that she loves me, and that I am often either her wife or her husband, and as you do not object to my being your rival and making her often as happy as I can, she does not want you either to suppose that her love is like hatred, for the love of a jealous heart is very much like it.”

“You plead the cause of your friend with the eloquence of an angel, but, dear little wife, you do not see the affair in its proper light.  You have intelligence and a pure soul, but you have not my experience.  M——­ M——­’s love for me has been nothing but a passing fancy, and she knows that I am not such an idiot as to be deceived by all this affair.  I am miserable, and it is her doing.”

“Then I should be right if I complained of her also, because she makes me feel that she is the mistress of my lover, and she shews me that, after seducing him from me, she gives him back to me without difficulty.  Then she wishes me to understand that she despises also my tender affection for her, since she places me in a position to shew that affection for another person.”

“Now, dearest, you speak without reason, for the relations between you two are of an entirely different nature.  Your mutual love is nothing but trifling nonsense, mere illusion of the senses.  The pleasures which you enjoy together are not exclusive.  To become jealous of one another it would be necessary that one of you two should feel a similar affection for another woman but M——­ M——­ could no more be angry at your having a lover than you could be so yourself if she had one; provided, however, that the lover should not belong to the other”

“But that is precisely our case, and you are mistaken.  We are not angry at your loving us both equally.  Have I not written to you that I would most willingly give you my place near M——­ M——?  Then you must believe that I despise you likewise?”