se Daudet: 'Artists' Wives.'

"In the case of the couple you see over there the accident occurred in a
special and terrible manner. The little woman played a frightful comedy,
or, rather, tragedy. She risked all to win all. Was she sincere? Did she
love Jean? Shall we ever know? Who is able to determine precisely how
much is put on and how much is real in the actions of a woman? They are
always sincere in an eternal mobility of impressions. They are furious,
criminal, devoted, admirable and base in obedience to intangible
emotions. They tell lies incessantly without intention, without knowing
or understanding why, and in spite of it all are absolutely frank
in their feelings and sentiments, which they display by violent,
unexpected, incomprehensible, foolish resolutions which overthrow
our arguments, our customary poise and all our selfish plans. The
unforeseenness and suddenness of their determinations will always render
them undecipherable enigmas as far as we are concerned. We continually
ask ourselves:

"'Are they sincere? Are they pretending?'

"But, my friend, they are sincere and insincere at one and the same
time, because it is their nature to be extremists in both and to be
neither one nor the other.

"See the methods that even the best of them employ to get what they
desire. They are complex and simple, these methods. So complex that we
can never guess at them beforehand, and so simple that after having been
victimized we cannot help being astonished and exclaiming: 'What! Did
she make a fool of me so easily as that?'

"And they always succeed, old man, especially when it is a question of
getting married.

"But this is Sumner's story:

"The little woman was a model, of course. She posed for him. She was
pretty, very stylish-looking, and had a divine figure, it seems. He
fancied that he loved her with his whole soul. That is another strange
thing. As soon as one likes a woman one sincerely believes that they
could not get along without her for the rest of their life. One knows
that one has felt the same way before and that disgust invariably
succeeded gratification; that in order to pass one's existence side by
side with another there must be not a brutal, physical passion which
soon dies out, but a sympathy of soul, temperament and temper. One
should know how to determine in the enchantment to which one is
subjected whether it proceeds from the physical, from a certain sensuous
intoxication, or from a