e
some friend who is dear to them, whom they see almost daily, who hides
nothing from them and from whom they hide nothing. But if they speak to
you of him you are surprised to find that, while continuing to love that
friend, they trace to you in him two contradictory portraits with the
same sincerity and the same probability.

They have a mistress, and that woman, even in the space sometimes of one
day, sees them, with fear, change toward her, who has remained the same.
It is that they have developed in them to a very intense degree the
imagination of the human soul, and that to observe is to them only a
pretext to construe. That infirmity had governed Julien from early
maturity. It was rarely manifested in a manner more unexpected than in
the case of charming Alba Steno, who was possibly dreaming of him at the
very moment when, in the silence of the night, he was forcing himself to
prove that she was capable of that species of epistolary parricide.

"After all," he said to himself, for there is iconoclasm in the
excessively intellectual, and they delight in destroying their dearest
moral or sentimental idols, the better to prove their strength, "after
all, have I really understood her relations toward her mother? When I
came to Rome in November, when I was to be presented to the Countess,
what did not only one, but nine or ten persons tell me? That Madame Steno
had a liaison with the husband of her daughter's best friend, and that
the little one was grieving about it. I went to the house. I saw the
child. She was sad that evening. I had the curiosity to wish to read her
heart.... It is six months since then. We have met almost daily, often
twice a day. She is so hermetically sealed that I am no farther advanced
than I was on the first day. I have seen her glance at her mother as she
did this morning, with loving, admiring eyes. I have seen her turn pale
at a word, a gesture, on her part. I have seen her embrace Maud Gorka,
and play tennis with that same friend so gayly, so innocently. I have
seen that she could not bear the presence of Maitland in a room, and yet
she asked the American to take her portrait.... Is she guileless?.... Is
she a hypocrite? Or is she tormented by doubt-divining, not
divining-believing, not believing in-her mother? Is she underhand in any
case, with her eyes the color of the sea? Has she the ambiguous mind at
once of a Russian and an Italian?.... This would be a solution of the
problem, tha