r one's neck, and
drawing her close to her heart, listened.

"Oh! I know that there was no excuse for me; I do not understand myself,
and since that day I feel as if I were mad. Be careful, my child, about
yourself--be careful! If you only knew how weak we are, how quickly
we yield, and fall. It takes so little, so little, so little, a moment of
tenderness, one of those sudden fits of melancholy which come over you,
one of those longings to open, your arms, to love, to cherish something,
which we all have at certain moments.

"You know my husband, and you know how fond I am of him; but he is mature
and sensible, and cannot even comprehend the tender vibrations of a
woman's heart. He is always the same, always good, always smiling, always
kind, always perfect. Oh! how I sometimes have wished that he would clasp
me roughly in his arms, that he would embrace me with those slow, sweet
kisses which make two beings intermingle, which are like mute
confidences! How I have wished that he were foolish, even weak, so that
he should have need of me, of my caresses, of my tears!

"This all seems very silly; but we women are made like that. How can we
help it?

"And yet the thought of deceiving him never entered my mind. Now it has
happened, without love, without reason, without anything, simply because
the moon shone one night on the Lake of Lucerne.

"During the month when we were travelling together, my husband, with his
calm indifference, paralyzed my enthusiasm, extinguished my poetic ardor.
When we were descending the mountain paths at sunrise, when as the four
horses galloped along with the diligence, we saw, in the transparent
morning haze, valleys, woods, streams, and villages, I clasped my hands
with delight, and said to him: 'How beautiful it is, dear! Give me a
kiss! Kiss me now!' He only answered, with a smile of chilling
kindliness: 'There is no reason why we should kiss each other because you
like the landscape.'

"And his words froze me to the heart. It seems to me that when people
love each other, they ought to feel more moved by love than ever, in the
presence of beautiful scenes.

"In fact, I was brimming over with poetry which he kept me from
expressing. I was almost like a boiler filled with steam and hermetically
sealed.

"One evening (we had for four days been staying in a hotel at Fluelen)
Robert, having one of his sick headaches, went to bed immediately after
dinner, and I went to take a walk all a