remarked in you, with pain, quite a feminine
propensity to theorize. Women _will_ do it. My dear Mrs. Bellasys, don't
look so dreadfully like an accusing angel about to bring me to book; you
know I am a hopeless heretic. They get up a sort of _Memoria Technica_
in early youth, and it clings to them all their life through. If they go
astray, they never cease proclaiming aloud that 'they know it's very
wrong;' though eminently unpractical, they think it due to themselves to
pet certain abstract truths (circumstances don't affect them in the
least), like that priestess of Cotytto, who said to the magistrate,
through her tears, 'I may have been unfortunate, but I've always been
respectable!' Sometimes principle gets the pull over passion, but, in
such a case, regrets come as often afterward as remorse does in the
reverse. I was reading a French story the other day--" He checked
himself with a laugh. "Bah! I am in the prosaic vein, it seems,
anecdoting like the old knave of clubs."

"Will you go on?" Flora said, leaning over toward him, her eyes
glittering in the firelight.

The thrill in her voice--strangely contagious it was--told how much she
was interested. I do not wonder at it. There was only one man on earth
for whom she had ever really cared--he sat beside her then--and, I
believe, what attracted her most in him was the daring disregard of
opinions, conventionalities, and more sacred things yet, which carried
him on straight to the accomplishment of his thought or purpose. In
those days, if either were an obstacle, he flinched no more before a
great moral law than at a big fence.

"Well," Guy went on, "it is the simple history of Fernande, an _ange
dechue_ of the Quartier Breda. She had formed a connection with a man
who suited her perfectly in every way, and they went on in happy
immorality, till she found out that Maurice had a wife somewhere, a very
charming person, who loved him dearly; perhaps she thought that the
possession of two such affections by one man was _de luxe_; at all
events, she cut him at once, refusing consistently to see him again.
Maurice, after trying all other means to move her in vain, resorted to
the expedient of a brain fever. When his wife and mother saw him very
near his end, they sent for Fernande as a last resource. They ought to
have preferred death to dishonor, of course; but, my dear Mrs. Bellasys,
they were not strong-minded. What would you have? There are women and
women.

"Sh