enly extinguished.

Once admitted into that charming domestic circle, he was not excluded
from it again, but took his lessons among the girls, and made bold to
talk with them when the good man closed his ledger. There everything
tended to give him grateful repose from the seething life in which the
Nabob's luxurious worldliness involved him; he bathed in that
atmosphere of honesty and simplicity, and strove to cure there the
wounds with which a hand more indifferent than cruel was mercilessly
riddling his heart.

* * *

"Women have hated me, other women have loved me. She who did me the
most harm never had either love or hate for me." Paul had fallen in,
with the woman of whom Heinrich Heine speaks. Felicia was very
hospitable and cordial to him. There was no one whom she welcomed more
graciously. She reserved for him a special smile, in which there was
the pleased expression of an artist's eye resting upon a type which
attracts it, and the satisfaction of a _blase_ mind which is amused by
anything new, however simple it may seem to be. She liked that reserve,
most alluring in a Southerner, the straightforwardness of that
judgment, entirely free from artistic or worldly formulas and enlivened
by a touch of local accent. It was a change for her from the zigzag
movement of the thumb, drawing flattery in outline with the gestures of
a studio fag, from the congratulations of comrades on the way in which
she silenced some poor fellow, and from the affected admiration, the
"chawming--veay pretty," with which the young dandies honored her as
they sucked the handles of their canes. He, at all events, said nothing
of that sort to her. She had nicknamed him Minerva, because of his
apparent tranquillity and the regularity of his profile; and as soon as
he appeared, she would say: "Ah! there's Minerva. Hail, lovely Minerva.
Take off your helmet and let us have a talk."

But that familiar, almost fraternal, tone convinced the young man of
the hopelessness of his love. He realized that he could not hope to
make any further progress in that feminine good-fellowship in which
affection was lacking, and that he should lose something every day of
his charm as an unfamiliar type in the eyes of that creature who was
born bored, and who seemed to have lived her life already and to find
the insipidity of repetition in everything that she heard or saw.
Felicia was suffering from ennui. Only her art ha