I know too well the miserable ways of the world, to take to the letter the accusations of immorality of which Madame de Palme is here the object on the part of the witches, as also on the part of some of her rivals who are silly enough to envy her social success.  It is not in that respect, as you may understand, that I treat her with so much severity.  Men, when they show themselves unmerciful for certain errors, are too apt to forget that they have all, more or less, spent part of their lives seeking to bring them about for their own benefit.  But there is in the feminine type which I have just sketched something more shocking than immorality itself, which, however, it is rather difficult to separate from it.  And so, notwithstanding my desire of not making myself conspicuous in anything, I have been unable to take upon myself to join the throng of admirers whom Madame de Palme drags after her triumphal car.  I know not whether

“Le tyran dans sa cour remarqua mon absence:” 

I am sometimes tempted to believe it, from the glances of astonishment and scorn with which I am overwhelmed when we meet; but it is more simple to attribute these hostile symptoms to the natural antipathy that separates two creatures as dissimilar as we are.  I look at her at times, myself, with the gaping surprise which must be excited in the mind of any thinking being by the monstrosity of such a psychological phenomenon.  In that way we are even.  I ought rather to say we were even, for we are really no longer so, since a rather cruel little adventure that happened to me last night, and which constitutes in my account-current with Madame de Palme a considerable advance, which she will find it difficult to make up.  I have told you that Madame de Malouet, through I know not what refinement of Christian charity, manifested a genuine predilection for the Little Countess.  I was talking with the marquise last evening in a corner of the drawing-room.  I took the liberty of telling her that this predilection, coming from a woman like her, was a bad example; that I had never very well understood, for my part, that passage of the Holy Scriptures in which the return of a single sinner is celebrated above the constant merit of a thousand just, and that this had always appeared to me very discouraging for the just.

“In the first place,” answered Madame de Malouet, “the just do not get discouraged; and in the next place, there are none.  Do you fancy yourself one, by chance?”

“Certainly not; I am perfectly well aware of the contrary.”

“Well, then, where do you get the right of judging your neighbor so severely?”

“I do not acknowledge Madame de Palme as my neighbor.”

“That’s convenient!  Madame de Palme, sir, has been badly brought up, badly married, and always spoilt; but, believe me, she is a genuine rough diamond.”

“I only see the roughness.”

“And rest assured that it only requires a skillful workman—­I mean a good husband—­to cut and polish it.”