eply loved, dared no more to look at her with understanding of her
pain, than she would have bared her back voluntarily to the knout. When,
therefore, Ivan, adopting the Princess' own tone, told her frankly that
she alone had power to keep away from him that _ennui_ which must
otherwise drive him out of Florence, she proceeded to tell him openly
which subjects must thenceforth remain closed between them. Of these,
the principal was her illness, which should, before Eastertide, free her
forever from the eyes of the gaping world.

She had had her first hemorrhage in October, immediately after her
return from Trouville, where she spent her summers. Christmas Day
brought the second--a severe one, which was stopped barely in time.
After that followed a long and peaceful interlude: weeks which Ivan
afterwards looked back on with wonder; for the glamour of her
personality, her magnetism, remained about that memory till the day of
his death. His intercourse with her combined the best features of
masculine comradeship and feminine Platonism before the mawkish stage is
reached. She had the ability, so rare in men, to draw out the best that
was in her companion. And Ivan would often find himself displaying
qualities of eloquence and brilliancy of which he had never suspected
the existence. But the woman never revealed to him their source. She
herself was more than rewarded by the originality and the depth of the
ideas which she merely taught him to express. For, though rhetoric may
be cultivated, the most wonderful of tacticians cannot put individual
ideas into the brains of a pupil.

Late February found the world, even down to Ivan's own servants, in a
state of hot resentment against the Prince's desertion of his class.
Ivan, however, cared not a whit. Daily he grew more absorbed: daily he
found some newly admirable thing about her in whom he had reawakened the
desire and the power to attract. True, their intercourse was purely
intellectual. Yet Ivan had long ago perceived, even in the midst of
wreck and disease, what this woman must have been in the heyday of her
indiscretion; and he realized how helpless he should have been in her
hands twenty years before. It is possible that, in time, the physical
might have come to life in him. He might have forgotten the years, the
emaciation, even the rouge and the careless efforts at concealing gray
hairs with badly-put-on dye. All this, perhaps, in time. But, well or
ill, fate had deter