id she loved nothing, others that she loved nothing but herself. A
single word, however, suffices to explain her character,--she was waiting.
From the age of fourteen she had heard it ceaselessly repeated that
nothing was so charming as she. She was convinced of this, and that was
why she paid so much attention to dress. In failing to do honor to her own
person, she would have thought herself guilty of sacrilege. She walked, in
her beauty, so to speak, like a child in its holiday dress; but she was
very far from thinking that her beauty was to remain useless.

Beneath her apparent unconcern she had a will, secret, inflexible, and the
more potent the better it was concealed. The coquetry of ordinary women,
which spends itself in ogling, in simpering, and in smiling, seemed to her
a childish, vain, almost contemptible way of fighting with shadows. She
felt herself in possession of a treasure, and she disdained to stake it
piece by piece; she needed an adversary worthy of herself; but, too
accustomed to see her wishes anticipated, she did not seek that adversary;
it may even be said that she felt astonished at his failing to present
himself.

For the four or five years that she had been out in society and had
conscientiously displayed her flowers, her furbelows, and her beautiful
shoulders, it seemed to her inconceivable that she had not yet inspired
some great passion.

Had she said what was really behind her thoughts, she certainly would have
replied to her many flatterers: "Well! if it is true that I am so
beautiful, why do you not blow your brains out for me?" An answer which
many other young girls might make, and which more than one who says
nothing hides away in a corner of her heart, not far perhaps from the tip
of her tongue.

What is there, indeed, in the world, more tantalizing for a woman than to
be young, rich, beautiful, to look at herself in her mirror and see
herself charmingly dressed, worthy in every way to please, fully disposed
to allow herself to be loved, and to have to say to herself: "I am
admired, I am praised, all the world thinks me charming, but nobody loves
me. My gown is by the best maker, my laces are superb, my coiffure is
irreproachable, my face the most beautiful on earth, my figure slender, my
foot prettily turned, and all this helps me to nothing but to go and yawn
in the corner of some drawing-room! If a young man speaks to me he treats
me as a child; if I am asked in marriage, it is