f the house favors intrigue. You are wrong, I must say, not
to take account of what people think. I am mistaken if your father does
not think it singular that you should go away with so much frivolity, and
the absence will be the more remarked, my dear, since circumstances have
made me eminent in the course of this legislature. My merit has nothing
to do with the case, surely. But if you had consented to listen to me at
dinner I should have demonstrated to you that the group of politicians to
which I belong has almost reached power. In such a moment you should not
renounce your duties as mistress of the house. You must understand this
yourself."

She replied "You annoy me." And, turning her back to him, she shut the
door of her room between them. That night in her bed she opened a book,
as she always did before going to sleep. It was a novel. She was turning
the leaves with indifference, when her eyes fell on these lines:

"Love is like devotion: it comes late. A woman is hardly in love or
devout at twenty, unless she has a special disposition to be either, a
sort of native sanctity. Women who are predestined to love, themselves
struggle a long time against that grace of love which is more terrible
than the thunderbolt that fell on the road to Damascus. A woman oftenest
yields to the passion of love only when age or solitude does not frighten
her. Passion is an arid and burning desert. Passion is profane
asceticism, as harsh as religious asceticism. Great woman lovers are as
rare as great penitent women. Those who know life well know that women do
not easily bind themselves in the chains of real love. They know that
nothing is less common than sacrifice among them. And consider how much a
worldly woman must sacrifice when she is in love--liberty, quietness, the
charming play of a free mind, coquetry, amusement, pleasure--she loses
everything.

"Coquetry is permissible. One may conciliate that with all the exigencies
of fashionable life. Not so love. Love is the least mundane of passions,
the most anti-social, the most savage, the most barbarous. So the world
judges it more severely than mere gallantry or looseness of manners. In
one sense the world is right. A woman in love betrays her nature and
fails in her function, which is to be admired by all men, like a work of
art. A woman is a work of art, the most marvellous that man's industry
ever has produced. A woman is a wonderful artifice, due to the concourse
of all t