s--you see it yourself, madame, and
religion alone offers us real consolation. Will you permit me to come
again?--to speak to you as a man who can sympathize with every trouble,
a man about whom there is nothing very alarming, I think?"

"Yes, monsieur, come back again. Thank you for your thought of me."

"Very well, madame; then I shall return very shortly."

This visit relaxed the tension of soul, as it were; the heavy strain
of grief and loneliness had been almost too much for the Marquise's
strength. The priest's visit had left a soothing balm in her heart, his
words thrilled through her with healing influence. She began to feel
something of a prisoner's satisfaction, when, after he has had time
to feel his utter loneliness and the weight of his chains, he hears a
neighbor knocking on the wall, and welcomes the sound which brings a
sense of human friendship. Here was an unhoped-for confidant. But
this feeling did not last for long. Soon she sank back into the old
bitterness of spirit, saying to herself, as the prisoner might say, that
a companion in misfortune could neither lighten her own bondage nor her
future.

In the first visit the cure had feared to alarm the susceptibilities
of self-absorbed grief, in a second interview he hoped to make some
progress towards religion. He came back again two days later, and from
the Marquise's welcome it was plain that she had looked forward to the
visit.

"Well, Mme. la Marquise, have you given a little thought to the great
mass of human suffering? Have you raised your eyes above our earth and
seen the immensity of the universe?--the worlds beyond worlds which
crush our vanity into insignificance, and with our vanity reduce our
sorrows?"

"No, monsieur," she said; "I cannot rise to such heights, our social
laws lie too heavily upon me, and rend my heart with a too poignant
anguish. And laws perhaps are less cruel than the usages of the world.
Ah! the world!"

"Madame, we must obey both. Law is the doctrine, and custom the practice
of society."

"Obey society?" cried the Marquise, with an involuntary shudder. "Eh!
monsieur, it is the source of all our woes. God laid down no law to
make us miserable; but mankind, uniting together in social life, have
perverted God's work. Civilization deals harder measure to us women than
nature does. Nature imposes upon us physical suffering which you have
not alleviated; civilization has developed in us thoughts and feelings
which