the
order of the day.

We cherish antipathies for a week and friendships for a month; we see
people with different eyes, when we view them through the medium of
acquaintanceship at watering places. We discover in men suddenly, after
an hour's chat, in the evening after dinner, under the trees in the park
where the healing spring bubbles up, a high intelligence and astonishing
merits, and a month afterward we have completely forgotten these new
friends, who were so fascinating when we first met them.

Permanent and serious ties are also formed here sooner than anywhere
else. People see each other every day; they become acquainted
very quickly, and their affection is tinged with the sweetness and
unrestraint of long-standing intimacies. We cherish in after years the
dear and tender memories of those first hours of friendship, the memory
of those first conversations in which a soul was unveiled, of those
first glances which interrogate and respond to questions and secret
thoughts which the mouth has not as yet uttered, the memory of that
first cordial confidence, the memory of that delightful sensation of
opening our hearts to those who seem to open theirs to us in return.

And the melancholy of watering places, the monotony of days that are all
alike, proves hourly an incentive to this heart expansion.

Well, this evening, as on every other evening, we awaited the appearance
of strange faces.

Only two appeared, but they were very remarkable, a man and a woman
--father and daughter. They immediately reminded me of some of Edgar
Poe's characters; and yet there was about them a charm, the charm
associated with misfortune. I looked upon them as the victims of fate.
The man was very tall and thin, rather stooped, with perfectly white
hair, too white for his comparatively youthful physiognomy; and
there was in his bearing and in his person that austerity peculiar to
Protestants. The daughter, who was probably twenty-four or twenty-five,
was small in stature, and was also very thin, very pale, and she had the
air of one who was worn out with utter lassitude. We meet people like
this from time to time, who seem too weak for the tasks and the needs of
daily life, too weak to move about, to walk, to do all that we do every
day. She was rather pretty; with a transparent, spiritual beauty. And
she ate with extreme slowness, as if she were almost incapable of moving
her arms.

It must have been she, assuredly, who had come to