“Ah, madly!  Do you know many women who love madly with their hearts and souls?  You talk like a college braggart.  There are conquerors like yourself who, if we are to believe them, would devour a whole convent at their breakfast.  These men excite my pity.  As for me, really, I have always felt that it was most difficult to make one’s self really loved.  In these days of prudery, almost all women of rank appear ’frappe a la glace’, like a bottle of champagne.  It is necessary to thaw them first, and there are some of them whose shells are so frigid that they would put out the devil’s furnace.  They call this virtue; I call it social servitude.  But what matters the name? the result is the same.”

“But, really, are you sure that Madame de Bergenheim loves you?” asked Marillac, emphasizing the word “love” so strongly as to attract his friend’s attention.

“Sure? of course I am!” replied the latter.  “Why do you ask me?”

“Because, when you are not quite so angry, I want to ask you something.”  He hesitated a moment.  “If you learned that she cares more for another than for you, what would you do?”

Gerfaut looked at him and smiled disdainfully.

“Listen!” said he, “you have heard me storm and curse, and you took this nonsense for genuine hatred.  My good fellow! do you know why I raved in such a manner?  It was because, knowing my temperament, I felt the necessity of getting angry and giving vent to what was in my heart.  If I had not employed this infallible remedy, the annoyance which this note caused me would have disturbed my nerves all night, and when I do not sleep my complexion is more leaden than usual and I have dark rings under my eyes.”

“Fop!”

“Simpleton!”

“Why simpleton?”

“Do you take me for a dandy?  Do you not understand why I wish to sleep soundly?  It is simply because I do not wish to appear before her with a face like a ghost.  That would be all that was needed to encourage her in her severity.  I shall take good care that she does not discover how hard her last thrust has hit me.  I would give you a one-hundred-franc note if I could secure for to-morrow morning your alderman’s face and your complexion a la Teniers.”

“Thanks, we are not masquerading just at present.”

“Nevertheless, all that you have said does not prove in the slightest that she loves you.”

“My dear Marillac, words may have escaped me in my anger which have caused you to judge hastily.  Now that I am calm and that my remedy has brought back my nervous system to its normal state, I will explain to you my real position.  She is my Galatea, I her Pygmalion.  ’An allegory as old as the world,’ you are about to say; old or not, it is my true story.  I have not yet broken the marble-virtue, education, propriety, duty, prejudices—­which covers the flesh of my statue; but I am nearing my goal and I shall reach it.  Her desperate resistance