d the power to divert
her, to take her out of herself, to transport her to a fairyland of
dazzling beauty from which she returned all bruised and sore, always
surprised at the awakening, which resembled a fall. She compared
herself to the jelly-fish, whose transparent brilliancy in the coolness
and constant movement of the waves, vanishes on the shore in little
gelatinous pools. During those intervals of idleness, when the absence
of thought leaves the hand inert upon the modelling tool, Felicia,
deprived of the sole moral nerve of her intellect, became savage,
unapproachable, sullen beyond endurance,--the revenge of paltry human
qualities upon great tired brains. After she had brought tears to the
eyes of all those whom she loved, had striven to evoke painful memories
or paralyzing anxieties, and had reached the brutal, murderous climax
of her fatigue,--as it was always necessary, where she was concerned,
that something ridiculous should be mingled even with the saddest
things, she would blow away the remains of her ennui with a cry like
that of a dazed wild beast, a sort of yawning roar which she called
"the cry of the jackal in the desert," and which would drive the blood
from the excellent Crenmitz's cheeks, taking her by surprise in her
torpid placidity.

Poor Felicia! Her life was in very truth a ghastly desert when her art
did not enliven it with its visions, a dismal, unrelieved desert, where
everything was crushed and flattened beneath the same monotonous
immensity, the ingenuous love of a boy of twenty and the caprice of an
amorous duke, where everything was covered with dry sand blown about by
the scorching winds of destiny. Paul was conscious of that void, he
tried to escape from it; but something detained him, like a weight
which unwinds a chain, and, notwithstanding the evil things he heard,
notwithstanding the strange creature's peculiarities, he hovered about
her with a delicious sense of enjoyment, under pain of carrying naught
away from that long amorous contemplation save the despair of a
believer reduced to the adoration of images.

The place of refuge was in yonder out-of-the-way quarter, where the
wind blew so hard without preventing the flame from burning white and
straight,--it was in the domestic circle presided over by Grandmamma.
Oh! she did not suffer from ennui, she never uttered "the cry of the
jackal in the desert." Her life was too well filled: the father to
comfort and encourage, the c