es which
promised to heighten all the pleasures to be derived from either
their contest or their union. Perhaps both of them, living a life of
adventure, had reached the singular moral condition in which, either
from weariness or in defiance of fate, the mind rejects serious
reflection and flings itself on chance in pursuing an enterprise
precisely because the issues of chance are unknown, and the interest of
expecting them vivid. The moral nature, like the physical nature, has
its abysses into which strong souls love to plunge, risking their future
as gamblers risk their fortune. Mademoiselle de Verneuil and the young
marquis had obtained a revelation of each other's minds as a consequence
of this interview, and their intercourse thus took rapid strides, for
the sympathy of their souls succeeded to that of their senses. Besides,
the more they felt fatally drawn to each other, the more eager they
were to study the secret action of their minds. The so-called Vicomte de
Bauvan, surprised at the seriousness of the strange girl's ideas, asked
himself how she could possibly combine such acquired knowledge of life
with so much youth and freshness. He thought he discovered an extreme
desire to appear chaste in the modesty and reserve of her attitudes.
He suspected her of playing a part; he questioned the nature of his own
pleasure; and ended by choosing to consider her a clever actress. He was
right; Mademoiselle de Verneuil, like other women of the world, grew the
more reserved the more she felt the warmth of her own feelings, assuming
with perfect naturalness the appearance of prudery, beneath which such
women veil their desires. They all wish to offer themselves as virgins
on love's altar; and if they are not so, the deception they seek to
practise is at least a homage which they pay to their lovers. These
thoughts passed rapidly through the mind of the young man and gratified
him. In fact, for both, this mutual examination was an advance in their
intercourse, and the lover soon came to that phase of passion in which
a man finds in the defects of his mistress a reason for loving her the
more.

Mademoiselle de Verneuil was thoughtful. Perhaps her imagination led her
over a greater extent of the future than that of the young _emigre_,
who was merely following one of the many impulses of his life as a man;
whereas Marie was considering a lifetime, thinking to make it beautiful,
and to fill it with happiness and with grand and