oul so great in
its power to feel. He had found, at last, the ideal of his fantastic
imaginings, the ideal so vigorously invoked by all who look on life as
the raw material of a passion for which many a one seeks ardently, and
dies before he has grasped the whole of the dreamed-of treasure.

With those words of hers in his ears, in the presence of her sublime
beauty, his own thoughts seemed poor and narrow. Powerless as he felt
himself to find words of his own, simple enough and lofty enough to
scale the heights of this exaltation, he took refuge in platitudes as to
the destiny of women.

"Madame, we must either forget our pain, or hollow out a tomb for
ourselves."

But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being
essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the
other is infinite. To set to work to reason where you are required to
feel, is the mark of a limited nature. Vandenesse therefore held his
peace, sat awhile with his eyes fixed upon her, then came away. A prey
to novel thoughts which exalted woman for him, he was in something the
same position as a painter who has taken the vulgar studio model for
a type of womanhood, and suddenly confronts the _Mnemosyne_ of the
Musee--that noblest and least appreciated of antique statues.

Charles de Vandenesse was deeply in love. He loved Mme. d'Aiglemont with
the loyalty of youth, with the fervor that communicates such ineffable
charm to a first passion, with a simplicity of heart of which a man only
recovers some fragments when he loves again at a later day. Delicious
first passion of youth, almost always deliciously savored by the woman
who calls it forth; for at the golden prime of thirty, from the poetic
summit of a woman's life, she can look out over the whole course of
love--backwards into the past, forwards into the future--and, knowing
all the price to be paid for love, enjoys her bliss with the dread of
losing it ever present with her. Her soul is still fair with her waning
youth, and passion daily gathers strength from the dismaying prospect of
the coming days.

"This is love," Vandenesse said to himself this time as he left the
Marquise, "and for my misfortune I love a woman wedded to her memories.
It is hard work to struggle against a dead rival, never present to
make blunders and fall out of favor, nothing of him left but his better
qualities. What is it but a sort of high treason against the Ideal to
attempt to break