as one of that set of Saint-Simon which had belonged
to her mother, and had already played a part in her own destiny.

She turned to the famous "character" of the Dauphin, of that model
prince, in whose death Saint-Simon, and Fenelon, and France herself, saw
the eclipse of all great hopes.

"A prince, affable, gentle, humane, patient, modest, full of
compunctions, and, as much as his position allowed--sometimes beyond
it--humble, and severe towards himself."

Was it not to the life? "_Affable, doux, humain--patient,
modeste--humble et austere pour soi_"--beyond what was expected, beyond,
almost, what was becoming?

She read on to the mention of the Dauphine, terrified, in her human
weakness, of so perfect a husband, and trying to beguile or tempt him
from the heights; to the picture of Louis Quatorze, the grandfather,
shamed in his worldly old age by the presence beside him of this saintly
and high-minded youth; of the Court, looking forward with dismay to the
time when it should find itself under the rule of a man who despised and
condemned both its follies and its passions, until she reached that
final rapture, where, in a mingled anguish and adoration, Saint-Simon
bids eternal farewell to a character and a heart of which France was
not worthy.

The lines passed before her, and she was conscious, guiltily conscious,
of reading them with a double mind.

Then she closed the book, held by the thought of her husband--in a
somewhat melancholy reverie.

There is a Catholic word with which in her convent youth she had been
very familiar--the word _recueilli_--"recollected." At no time
had it sounded kindly in her ears; for it implied fetters and
self--suppressions--of the voluntary and spiritual sort--wholly
unwelcome to and unvalued by her own temperament. But who that knew him
well could avoid applying it to Delafield? A man of "recollection"
living in the eye of the Eternal; keeping a guard over himself in the
smallest matters of thought and action; mystically possessed by the
passion of a spiritual ideal; in love with charity, purity,
simplicity of life.

She bowed her head upon her hands in dreariness of spirit. Ultimately,
what could such a man want with her? What had she to give him? In what
way could she ever be _necessary_ to him? And a woman, even in
friendship, must feel herself that to be happy.

Already this daily state in which she found herself--of owing everything
and giving nothing--produced in h