ou a thousand times to speak, but you have remained dumb, impenetrable,
inflexible, inexorable, and now to-day you tell me that you have been
lying. For six years you have actually allowed me to believe such a
thing! No, you are lying now, I do not know why, but out of pity for me,
perhaps?"

She replied in a sincere and convincing manner: "If I had not done so, I
should have had four more children in the last six years!"

"Can a mother speak like that?"

"Oh!" she replied, "I do not feel that I am the mother of children who
never have been born; it is enough for me to be the mother of those that
I have and to love them with all my heart. I am a woman of the civilized
world, monsieur--we all are--and we are no longer, and we refuse to be,
mere females to restock the earth."

She got up, but he seized her hands. "Only one word, Gabrielle. Tell me
the truth!"

"I have just told you. I never have dishonored you."

He looked her full in the face, and how beautiful she was, with her gray
eyes, like the cold sky. In her dark hair sparkled the diamond coronet,
like a radiance. He suddenly felt, felt by a kind of intuition, that
this grand creature was not merely a being destined to perpetuate the
race, but the strange and mysterious product of all our complicated
desires which have been accumulating in us for centuries but which
have been turned aside from their primitive and divine object and have
wandered after a mystic, imperfectly perceived and intangible beauty.
There are some women like that, who blossom only for our dreams, adorned
with every poetical attribute of civilization, with that ideal luxury,
coquetry and esthetic charm which surround woman, a living statue that
brightens our life.

Her husband remained standing before her, stupefied at his tardy
and obscure discovery, confusedly hitting on the cause of his former
jealousy and understanding it all very imperfectly, and at last lie
said: "I believe you, for I feel at this moment that you are not lying,
and before I really thought that you were."

She put out her hand to him: "We are friends then?"

He took her hand and kissed it and replied: "We are friends. Thank you,
Gabrielle."

Then he went out, still looking at her, and surprised that she was still
so beautiful and feeling a strange emotion arising in him.

THE FATHER

I

He was a clerk in the Bureau of Public Education and lived at
Batignolles. He took the omnibus to Paris every mo