ce of a Hindu high-priest. He came and went; and she followed
him. During the last two years, she has been his faithful disciple."

"But what does she preach?"

Marcienne made a vague gesture:

"Buddhist doctrines! She believes that she possesses the true faith and
tries to hand it on to others. In the few days which she has spent in
Paris, she has already made two converts, those two innocents who are
hanging on her words. It would all be charming, you know, if her creed
did not enjoin chastity and if, by holding those views, she did not risk
the awful fate of never knowing love!"

Marcienne continued, still addressing herself to my new friend:

"Do you see those pretty creatures in white, standing close to Hermione?
They are two orphans, two girls who fell in love with the same man. I
don't know the details of the romance, nor can I say whether it was
fancy or passion that guided the man's choice. All I know is that he
loved one of them and had a child by her. A little while after, he
deserted her. Thereupon their unhappy love reunited those two hearts
which happy love, as always, had divided. The same devotion and kindness
made them both bend over the one cradle. Oh, the adorable pity that
prompted Anne's heart on the day when, hearing her baby call her mamma
for the first time, she sent for her sister Marie and, holding towards
her those little outstretched arms, those eyes in which consciousness
was dawning, that little fluttering life seeking a resting-place, she
offered the maid, in the exquisite mystery of that first smile, the
first name of love! From that time onward, the baby grew up between its
two mammas as one treads a sunny path between two flowering banks."

Marcienne had a gift for pretty phrases of this kind, which she would
let fall not without a certain affectation. She liked talking and I
liked listening to her. I asked her what she thought of Rose. She
praised her beauty highly and even said the occasional awkwardness of
her movements made it more uncommon:

"For that matter," she added, "if it were not so, I should try to be
blind to it. A woman must understand that she lowers herself by
belittling her sisters. How immensely we increase man's ascendancy by
never praising one another!"

I began to laugh:

"Alas, I would not dare to say that the wisest among us, in extolling
our own sex, are not once more seeking the admiration of some man!"

And Marcienne, who has been to such pains to r