nature. I know you all by
heart. Ah! I know you well--St. Pierre, the Parisienne--cette
maitresse-femme, my cousin Beck herself."

"It is not right, Monsieur."

"Comment? it is not right? By whose creed? Does some dogma of Calvin or
Luther condemn it? What is that to me? I am no Protestant. My rich
father (for, though I have known poverty, and once starved for a year
in a garret in Rome--starved wretchedly, often on a meal a day, and
sometimes not that--yet I was born to wealth)--my rich father was a
good Catholic; and he gave me a priest and a Jesuit for a tutor. I
retain his lessons; and to what discoveries, grand Dieu! have they not
aided me!"

"Discoveries made by stealth seem to me dishonourable discoveries."

"Puritaine! I doubt it not. Yet see how my Jesuit's system works. You
know the St. Pierre?"

"Partially."

He laughed. "You say right--_'partially'_; whereas _I_ know her
_thoroughly_; there is the difference. She played before me the
amiable; offered me patte de velours; caressed, flattered, fawned on
me. Now, I am accessible to a woman's flattery--accessible against my
reason. Though never pretty, she was--when I first knew her--young, or
knew how to look young. Like all her countrywomen, she had the art of
dressing--she had a certain cool, easy, social assurance, which spared
me the pain of embarrassment--"

"Monsieur, that must have been unnecessary. I never saw you embarrassed
in my life."

"Mademoiselle, you know little of me; I can be embarrassed as a petite
pensionnaire; there is a fund of modesty and diffidence in my nature--"

"Monsieur, I never saw it."

"Mademoiselle, it is there. You ought to have seen it."

"Monsieur, I have observed you in public--on platforms, in tribunes,
before titles and crowned heads--and you were as easy as you are in the
third division."

"Mademoiselle, neither titles nor crowned heads excite my modesty; and
publicity is very much my element. I like it well, and breathe in it
quite freely;--but--but, in short, here is the sentiment brought into
action, at this very moment; however, I disdain to be worsted by it.
If, Mademoiselle, I were a marrying man (which I am not; and you may
spare yourself the trouble of any sneer you may be contemplating at the
thought), and found it necessary to ask a lady whether she could look
upon me in the light of a future husband, then would it be proved that
I am as I say--modest."

I quite believed him now; and, in belie