“‘She shall love me,’ said I, on the day I reached this conclusion.  In order to formulate in a decisive manner the accomplishment of my desire, I relied upon the following propositions, which are to me articles of faith.

“No woman is unattainable, except when she loves another.  Thus, a woman who does not love, and who has resisted nine admirers, will yield to the tenth.  The only question for me was to be the tenth.  Here began the problem to be solved.

“Madame de Bergenheim had been married only three years; her husband, who was good-looking and young, passed for a model husband; if these latter considerations were of little importance, the first was of great weight.  According to all probability, it was too soon for any serious attack.  Without being beautiful, she pleased much and many; a second obstacle, since sensibility in women is almost always developed in inverse ratio to their success.  She had brains; she was wonderfully aristocratic in all her tastes.

“Last, being very much the fashion, sought after and envied, she was under the special surveillance of pious persons, old maids, retired beauties in one word, all that feminine mounted police, whose eyes, ears, and mouths seem to have assumed the express mission of annoying sensitive hearts while watching over the preservation of good morals.

“This mass of difficulties, none of which escaped me, traced as many lines upon my forehead as if I had been commanded to solve at once all the propositions in Euclid.  She shall love me! these words flashed unceasingly before my eyes; but the means to attain this end?  No satisfactory plan came to me.  Women are so capricious, deep, and unfathomable!  It is, with them, the thing soonest done which is soonest ended!  A false step, the least awkwardness, a want of intelligence, a quarter of an hour too soon or too late!  One thing only was evident:  it needed a grand display of attractions, a complete plan of gallant strategy; but, then, what more?

“That earthly paradise of the Montanvert was far from us, where I had been able in less time than it would take to walk over a quadrille, to expose her to death, to save her afterward, and finally to say to her ’I love you!’ Passion in drawing-rooms is not allowed those free, dramatic ways; flowers fade in the candle-light; the oppressive atmosphere of balls and fetes stifles the heart, so ready to dilate in pure mountain air.  The unexpected and irresistible influence of the glacier would have been improper and foolish in Paris.  There, an artless sympathy, stronger than social conventions, had drawn us to each other—­Octave and Clemence.  Here, she was the Baroness de Bergenheim, and I the Vicomte de Gerfaut.  I must from necessity enter the ordinary route, begin the romance at the first page, without knowing how to connect the prologue with it.

“What should be my plan of campaign?