, what age would you
give that young lady whose birthday we are celebrating?"

"Seventeen--eighteen--perhaps nineteen."

"I thought you'd say so; she looks nineteen. Well, I can tell you her
age to an hour. She is fifteen to-day."

"Fifteen!"

"Not a day older, and yet she is the most finished coquette in Europe.
Having given Fiume to understand that there is not a man here whose
pretensions she would listen to, her whole aim and object is to surround
herself with admirers,--I might say worshippers. Young fellows are fools
enough to believe they have a chance of winning her favor, while each
sees how contemptuously she treats the other. They do not perceive it is
the number of adorers she cares for."

"But what is all this to me?"

"Simply that you 'll be enlisted in that corps to-morrow," said he, with
a malicious laugh; "and I thought I 'd do you a good turn to warn you as
to what is in store for you."

"Me? _I_ enlisted! Why, just bethink you, sir, who and what I am: the
very lowest creature in her father's employment."

"What does that signify? There's a mystery about you. You are not--at
least you were not--what you seem now. You have as good looks and better
manners than the people usually about her. She can amuse herself with
you, and so far harmlessly that she can dismiss you when she's tired of
you, and if she can only persuade you to believe yourself in love
with her, and can store up a reasonable share of misery for you in
consequence, you 'll make her nearer being happy than she has felt this
many a day."

"I don't understand all this," said I, doubtingly.

"Well, you will one of these days; that is, unless you have the good
sense to take my warning in good part, and avoid her altogether."

"It will be quite enough for me to bear in mind who she is, and what _I_
am!" said I, calmly.

"You think so? Well, I don't agree with you. At all events, keep what I
have said to yourself, even if you don't mean to profit by it" And with
this he left me.

That strange education of mine, in which M. de Balzac figured as a chief
instructor, made me reflect on what I had heard in a spirit little
like that of an ordinary lad of sixteen years of age. Those wonderful
stories, in which passion and emotion represent action, and where the
great game of life is played out at a fireside or in a window recess,
and where feeling and sentiment war and fight and win or lose,--these
same tales supplied me with wherewith