in the Upper House."

"My friend, we are parting for ever," said Madame de la Baudraye,
trying to control the trembling of her voice. "I have dismissed the
two servants. When you go in, you will find the house in order, and no
debts. I shall always feel a mother's affection for you, but in secret.
Let us part calmly, without a fuss, like decent people.

"Have you had a fault to find with my conduct during the past six
years?"

"None, but that you have spoiled my life, and wrecked my prospects,"
said he in a hard tone. "You have read Benjamin Constant's book very
diligently; you have even studied the last critique on it; but you
have read with a woman's eyes. Though you have one of those superior
intellects which would make a fortune of a poet, you have never dared to
take the man's point of view.

"That book, my dear, is of both sexes.--We agreed that books were male
or female, dark or fair. In _Adolphe_ women see nothing but Ellenore;
young men see only Adolphe; men of experience see Ellenore and Adolphe;
political men see the whole of social existence. You did not think it
necessary to read the soul of Adolphe--any more than your critic indeed,
who saw only Ellenore. What kills that poor fellow, my dear, is that
he has sacrificed his future for a woman; that he never can be what he
might have been--an ambassador, a minister, a chamberlain, a poet--and
rich. He gives up six years of his energy at that stage of his life when
a man is ready to submit to the hardships of any apprenticeship--to
a petticoat, which he outstrips in the career of ingratitude, for the
woman who has thrown over her first lover is certain sooner or later to
desert the second. Adolphe is, in fact, a tow-haired German, who has
not spirit enough to be false to Ellenore. There are Adolphes who spare
their Ellenores all ignominious quarreling and reproaches, who say to
themselves, 'I will not talk of what I have sacrificed; I will not for
ever be showing the stump of my wrist to let that incarnate selfishness
I have made my queen,' as Ramorny does in _The Fair Maid of Perth_. But
men like that, my dear, get cast aside.

"Adolphe is a man of birth, an aristocratic nature, who wants to get
back into the highroad to honors and recover his social birthright, his
blighted position.--You, at this moment, are playing both parts. You
are suffering from the pangs of having lost your position, and think
yourself justified in throwing over a hapless lover w