Thereupon, holding each other’s hands tightly clasped, the two women went over to a sofa in a dark corner of the room, into which they sank, and the younger sister, passing her arm over the elder one’s neck, and drawing her close to her heart, listened.

“Oh!  I know that there was no excuse for me; I do not understand myself, and since that day I feel as if I were mad.  Be careful, my child, about yourself—­be careful!  If you only knew how weak we are, how quickly we yield, and fall.  It takes so little, so little, so little, a moment of tenderness, one of those sudden fits of melancholy which come over you, one of those longings to open, your arms, to love, to cherish something, which we all have at certain moments.

“You know my husband, and you know how fond I am of him; but he is mature and sensible, and cannot even comprehend the tender vibrations of a woman’s heart.  He is always the same, always good, always smiling, always kind, always perfect.  Oh! how I sometimes have wished that he would clasp me roughly in his arms, that he would embrace me with those slow, sweet kisses which make two beings intermingle, which are like mute confidences!  How I have wished that he were foolish, even weak, so that he should have need of me, of my caresses, of my tears!

“This all seems very silly; but we women are made like that.  How can we help it?

“And yet the thought of deceiving him never entered my mind.  Now it has happened, without love, without reason, without anything, simply because the moon shone one night on the Lake of Lucerne.

“During the month when we were travelling together, my husband, with his calm indifference, paralyzed my enthusiasm, extinguished my poetic ardor.  When we were descending the mountain paths at sunrise, when as the four horses galloped along with the diligence, we saw, in the transparent morning haze, valleys, woods, streams, and villages, I clasped my hands with delight, and said to him:  ’How beautiful it is, dear!  Give me a kiss!  Kiss me now!’ He only answered, with a smile of chilling kindliness:  ’There is no reason why we should kiss each other because you like the landscape.’

“And his words froze me to the heart.  It seems to me that when people love each other, they ought to feel more moved by love than ever, in the presence of beautiful scenes.

“In fact, I was brimming over with poetry which he kept me from expressing.  I was almost like a boiler filled with steam and hermetically sealed.

“One evening (we had for four days been staying in a hotel at Fluelen) Robert, having one of his sick headaches, went to bed immediately after dinner, and I went to take a walk all alone along the edge of the lake.

“It was a night such as one reads of in fairy tales.  The full moon showed itself in the middle of the sky; the tall mountains, with their snowy crests, seemed to wear silver crowns; the waters of the lake glittered with tiny shining ripples.  The air was mild, with that kind of penetrating warmth which enervates us till we are ready to faint, to be deeply affected without any apparent cause.  But how sensitive, how vibrating the heart is at such moments! how quickly it beats, and how intense is its emotion!