her character. She lived as retired as in a convent. I
saw her but seldom, and only during my last year at the university,
when the illness of her husband afforded me an opportunity of meeting
in his apartment.

The tenderest anxiety for the health of M. Bertollon was visible in all
her features. She was incessantly with him, administering his
medicine, or reading to him; and, when the illness reached its crisis,
she never quitted his bedside, but even destroyed her own health by her
continual nightly watching.

When M. Bertollon recovered, he continued his cold and polite behaviour
towards her, and never returned her affection. This indifference she
seemed to feel deeply, and by degrees became estranged from him as his
health returned. I could only pity her, and reproach my friend.

"But what do you demand of me, Colas?" he said one day. "Are you
master of your own heart, that you can ask obedience from mine? I
grant you my wife is beautiful; but mere beauty is only a pleasing
gloss, under which the heart remains cold. Why do we not fall in love
with the _chefs-d'oeuvre_ of the sculptor? I grant you she has
understanding; this, however, we do not love, but at most admire. She
is charitable; but she has money enough, and takes no pleasure in
expensive amusements. She showed me much attention during my illness;
for that I am grateful to her. She shall not want any thing that she
wishes, and I can give; but the heart cannot be given, that must be
taken. As to the rest, my friend, you do not know her. She also has
her failings; nay, if you will allow so much, her faults. If it should
unfortunately happen, now, that some of these faults are of such a
nature as necessarily to extinguish every rising feeling of affection
in me, am I to blame, that I cannot change stone into gold, and
transform a marriage of convenience into one of the heart?"

"But, dear Bertollon, I never even discovered the slightest trace of
such a repulsive fault."

"That is because you do not know my wife. To you, as my friend, I may
reveal what has estranged me from her for ever, even during the very
first days of our marriage. It is her untameable and unreasonable
temper, which is as an all-consuming fire. Trust not the ice and snow
of the external veil; a volcano is burning within it which, from time
to time, must emit its flames, or it would burst its outward covering.
She is quiet, but the more dangerous; every feeling is fer