eam of silks, velvets, and
lace. And, despite Rodolphe's prohibition, she continued to frequent
these women, who were all of one mind in persuading her to break off
with the Bohemian who could not even give her a hundred and fifty francs
to buy a stuff dress.

"Pretty as you are," said her advisers, "you can easily secure a better
position. You have only to look for it."

And Mademoiselle Mimi began to look. A witness of her frequent absences,
clumsily accounted for, Rodolphe entered upon the painful track of
suspicion. But as soon as he felt himself on the trail of some proof of
infidelity, he eagerly drew a bandage over his eyes in order to see
nothing. However, a strange, jealous, fantastic, quarrelsome love which
the girl did not understand, because she then only felt for Rodolphe
that lukewarm attachment resulting from habit. Besides, half of her
heart had already been expended over her first love, and the other half
was still full of the remembrance of her first lover.

Eight months passed by in this fashion, good and evil days alternating.
During this period Rodolphe was a score of times on the point of
separating from Mademoiselle Mimi, who had for him all the clumsy
cruelties of the woman who does not love. Properly speaking, this life
had become a hell for both. But Rodolphe had grown accustomed to these
daily struggles, and dreaded nothing so much as a cessation of this
state of things; for he felt that with it would cease forever the fever
and agitations of youth that he had not felt for so long. And then, if
everything must be told, there were hours in which Mademoiselle Mimi
knew how to make Rodolphe forget all the suspicions that were tearing at
his heart. There were moments when she caused him to bend like a child
at her knee beneath the charm of her blue eyes--the poet to whom she had
given back his lost poetry--the young man to whom she had restored his
youth, and who, thanks to her, was once more beneath love's equator. Two
or three times a month, amidst these stormy quarrels, Rodolphe and Mimi
halted with one accord at the verdant oasis of a night of love, and for
whole hours would give himself up to addressing her in that charming yet
absurd language that passion improvises in its hour of delirium. Mimi
listened calmly at first, rather astonished than moved, but, in the end,
the enthusiastic eloquence of Rodolphe, by turns tender, lively, and
melancholy, won on her by degrees. She felt the ice of