nger, and we ought not to resist them too much,
because they come from God; while the laws only come from men. If we did
not perfume life with love, as much love as possible, darling, as we put
sugar into drugs for children, nobody would care to take it just as it
is."

Berthe opened her eyes wide in astonishment. She murmured:

"Oh! grandmamma, we can only love once."

The grandmother raised her trembling hands toward Heaven, as if again to
invoke the defunct god of gallantries. She exclaimed indignantly:

"You have become a race of serfs, a race of common people. Since the
Revolution, it is impossible any longer to recognize society. You have
attached big words to every action, and wearisome duties to every corner
of existence; you believe in equality and eternal passion. People have
written poetry telling you that people have died of love. In my time
poetry was written to teach men to love every woman. And we! when we
liked a gentleman, my child, we sent him a page. And when a fresh caprice
came into our hearts, we were not slow in getting rid of the last
Lover--unless we kept both of them."

The old woman smiled a keen smile, and a gleam of roguery twinkled in her
gray eye, the intellectual, skeptical roguery of those people who did not
believe that they were made of the same clay as the rest, and who lived
as masters for whom common beliefs were not intended.

The young girl, turning very pale, faltered out:

"So, then, women have no honor?"

The grandmother ceased to smile. If she had kept in her soul some of
Voltaire's irony, she had also a little of Jean Jacques's glowing
philosophy: "No honor! because we loved, and dared to say so, and even
boasted of it? But, my child, if one of us, among the greatest ladies in
France, had lived without a lover, she would have had the entire court
laughing at her. Those who wished to live differently had only to enter a
convent. And you imagine, perhaps, that your husbands will love but you
alone, all their lives. As if, indeed, this could be the case. I tell you
that marriage is a thing necessary in order that society should exist,
but it is not in the nature of our race, do you understand? There is only
one good thing in life, and that is love. And how you misunderstand it!
how you spoil it! You treat it as something solemn like a sacrament, or
something to be bought, like a dress."

The young girl caught the old woman's trembling hands in her own.

"Hold your ton