tters described,
was presented to the mind of the jealous wife. What irony to perceive
thus those two lovers, whom she had wished to strike, with the ecstacy
of bliss in their eyes! Lydia would have liked to tear out their eyes,
his as well as hers, and to trample them beneath her heel. A fresh flood
of hatred filled her heart. God! how she hated them, and with what
a powerless hatred! But her time would come; another need pressed
sorely--to prevent the meeting of the following day, to save her
brother. To whom should she turn, however? To Dorsenne? To Montfanon?
To Baron Hafner? To Peppino Ardea? She thought by turns of the four
personages whose almost simultaneous visits had caused her to believe
that they were the seconds of the two champions. She rejected them,
one after the other, comprehending that none of them possessed enough
authority to arrange the affair. Her thoughts finally reverted to
Florent's adversary, to Boleslas Gorka, whose wife was her friend and
whom she had always found so courteous. What if she should ask him to
spare her brother? It was not Florent against whom the discarded lover
bore a grudge. Would he not be touched by her tears? Would he not tell
her what had led to the quarrel and what she should ask of her brother
that the quarrel might be conciliated? Could she not obtain from him
the promise to discharge his weapon in the air, if the duel was with
pistols, or, if it was with swords, simply to disarm his enemy?

Like nearly all persons unversed in the art, she believed in infallible
fencers, in marksmen who never missed their aim, and she had also ideas
profoundly, absolutely inexact on the relations of one man with another
in the matter of an insult. But how can women admit that inflexible
rigor in certain cases, which forms the foundation of manly relations,
when they themselves allow of a similar rigor neither in their arguments
with men, nor in their discussions among themselves? Accustomed always
to appeal from convention to instinct and from reason to sentiment, they
are, in the face of certain laws, be they those of justice or of honor,
in a state of incomprehension worse than ignorance. A duel, for example,
appears to them like an arbitrary drama, which the wish of one of those
concerned can change at his fancy. Ninety-nine women out of a hundred
would think like Lydia Maitland of hastening to the adversary of the man
they love, to demand, to beg for his life. Let us add, however,