oul, one of those longings to open
your arms, to love, to embrace, which we all have at certain moments.

"You know my husband, and you know how fond of him I am; but he is
mature and sensible, and cannot even comprehend the tender vibrations
of a woman's heart. He is always, always the same, always good, always
smiling, always kind, always perfect. Oh! how I sometimes have wished
that he would roughly clasp me in his arms, that he would embrace me
with those slow, sweet kisses which make two beings intermingle, which
are like mute confidences! How I wished that he was self-abandoned and
even weak, so that he should have need of me, of my caress, of my
tears!

"This all seems very silly; but we women are made like that. How can
we help it?

"And yet the thought of deceiving never came near me. To-day, it has
happened, without love, without reason, without anything, simply
because the moon shone one night on the Lake of Lucerne.

"During the month when we were traveling together, my husband, with
his calm indifference, paralyzed my enthusiasm, extinguished my poetic
ardor. When we were descending the mountain paths at sun-rise, when as
the four horses galloped along with the diligence, we saw, in the
transparent morning haze, valleys, woods, streams, and villages, I
clasped my hands with delight, and said to him: 'What a beautiful
scene, darling! Kiss me now!' He only answered with a smile of
chilling kindliness: 'There is no reason why we should kiss each other
because you like the landscape.'

"And his words froze me to the heart. It seems to me that when people
love each other, they ought to feel more moved by love than ever in
the presence of beautiful scenes.

"Indeed he prevented the effervescent poetry that bubbled up within me
from gushing out. How can I express it? I was almost like a boiler,
filled with steam and hermetically sealed.

"One evening (we had been for four days staying in the Hotel de
Fluelen), Robert, having got one of his sick headaches, went to bed
immediately after dinner, and I went to take a walk all alone along
the edge of the lake.

"It was a night such as one might read of in a fairy tale. The full
moon showed itself in the middle of the sky; the tall mountains, with
their snowy crests seemed to wear silver crowns; the waters of the
lake glittered with tiny rippling motions. The air was mild, with that
kind of penetrating freshness which softens us till we seem to be
swooning, t