ad 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 tongue, I beg of you, grandmamma!"

And, on her knees, with tears in her eyes, she prayed to Heaven to
bestow on her a great passion, one sole, eternal passion in accordance
with the dream of modern poets, while the grandmother, kissing her on
the forehead, quite imbued still with that charming, healthy reason
with which gallant philosophers tinctured the thought of the eighteenth
century, murmured:

"Take care, my poor darling! If you believe in such folly as that, you
will be very unhappy."

FRIEND JOSEPH

They had been great friends all winter in Paris. As is always the case,
they had lost sight of each other after leaving school, and had met
again when they were old and gray-haired. One of them had married, but
the other had remained in single blessedness.

M. de Meroul lived for six months in Paris and for six months in
his little chateau at Tourbeville. Having married the daughter of
a neighboring, squire, he had lived a good and peaceful life in
the indolence of a man who has nothing to do. Of a calm and quiet
disposition, and not over-intelligent he used to spend his time quietly
regretting the past, grieving over the customs and institutions of the
day and continually repeating to his wife, who would lift her eyes, and
sometimes her hands, to heaven, as a sign of energetic assent: "Good
gracious! What a government!"

Madame de Meroul resembled her husband intellectually as though she
had been his sister. She knew, by tradition, that one should above all
respect the Pope and the King!

And she loved and respected them from the bottom of her heart, without
knowing them, with a poetic fervor, with an hereditary devotion, with
the tenderness of a wellborn woman. She was good to, the marrow of her
bones. She had had no children, and never ceased mourning the fact.

On meeting his old friend, Joseph Mouradour, at a ball, M. de Meroul
was