they owe to a wife a name they could not achieve for themselves.
Possibly there are such men. Where?--among those that are already united
by sympathies in the same callings, the same labours, the same hopes and
fears with the women who have left behind them the privacies of home.
Madame de Grantmesnil was wrong. Artists should wed with artists.
True--true!"

Here she passed her hand over her forehead--it was a pretty way of hers
when seeking to concentrate thought--and was silent a moment or so.

"Did you ever feel," she then asked dreamily, "that there are moments in
life when a dark curtain seems to fall over one's past that a day before
was so clear, so blended with the present? One cannot any longer look
behind; the gaze is attracted onward, and a track of fire flashes upon
the future,--the future which yesterday was invisible. There is a line
by some English poet--Mr. Vane once quoted it, not to me, but to M.
Savarin, and in illustration of his argument, that the most complicated
recesses of thought are best reached by the simplest forms of
expression. I said to myself, 'I will study that truth if ever I take to
literature as I have taken to song;' and--yes--it was that evening
that the ambition fatal to woman fixed on me its relentless fangs--at
Enghien--we were on the lake--the sun was setting."

"But you do not tell me the line that so impressed you," said Mrs.
Morley, with a woman's kindly tact.

"The line--which line? Oh, I remember; the line was this:

"'I see as from a tower the end of all."

"And now--kiss me, dearest--never a word again to me about this
conversation: never a word about Mr. Vane--the dark curtain has fallen
on the past."

CHAPTER XI.

Men and women are much more like each other in certain large elements
of character than is generally supposed, but it is that very resemblance
which makes their differences the more incomprehensible to each other;
just as in politics, theology, or that most disputatious of all things
disputable, metaphysics, the nearer the reasoners approach each other in
points that to an uncritical bystander seem the most important, the
more sure they are to start off in opposite directions upon reaching the
speck of a pin-prick.

Now there are certain grand meeting-places between man and woman--the
grandest of all is on the ground of love, and yet here also is the great
field of quarrel. And here the teller of a tale such as mine ought,
if he is sufficient