“What is it, Felicite?” asked the marquise.

“I am forty years old, and I love him!” said Mademoiselle des Touches, with dreadful tones of agony in her voice, her eyes becoming hard and brilliant.  “If you knew, Beatrix, the tears I have shed over the lost years of my youth!  To be loved out of pity! to know that one owes one’s happiness only to perpetual care, to the slyness of cats, to traps laid for innocence and all the youthful virtues—­oh, it is infamous!  If it were not that one finds absolution in the magnitude of love, in the power of happiness, in the certainty of being forever above all other women in his memory, the first to carve on that young heart the ineffaceable happiness of an absolute devotion, I would —­yes, if he asked it,—­I would fling myself into the sea.  Sometimes I find myself wishing that he would ask it; it would then be an oblation, not a suicide.  Ah, Beatrix, by coming here you have, unconsciously, set me a hard task.  I know it will be difficult to keep him against you; but you love Conti, you are noble and generous, you will not deceive me; on the contrary, you will help me to retain my Calyste’s love.  I expected the impression you would make upon him, but I have not committed the mistake of seeming jealous; that would only have added fuel to the flame.  On the contrary, before you came, I described you in such glowing colors that you hardly realize the portrait, although you are, it seems to me, more beautiful than ever.”

This vehement elegy, in which truth was mingled with deception, completely duped the marquise.  Claude Vignon had told Conti the reasons for his departure, and Beatrix was, of course, informed of them.  She determined therefore to behave with generosity and give the cold shoulder to Calyste; but at the same instant there came into her soul that quiver of joy which vibrates in the heart of every woman when she finds herself beloved.  The love a woman inspires in any man’s heart is flattery without hypocrisy, and it is impossible for some women to forego it; but when that man belongs to a friend, his homage gives more than pleasure,—­it gives delight.  Beatrix sat down beside her friend and began to coax her prettily.

“You have not a white hair,” she said; “you haven’t even a wrinkle; your temples are just as fresh as ever; whereas I know more than one woman of thirty who is obliged to cover hers.  Look, dear,” she added, lifting her curls, “see what that journey to Italy has cost me.”

Her temples showed an almost imperceptible withering of the texture of the delicate skin.  She raised her sleeves and showed Camille the same slight withering of the wrists, where the transparent tissue suffered the blue network of swollen veins to be visible, and three deep lines made a bracelet of wrinkles.

“There, my dear, are two spots which—­as a certain writer ferreting for the miseries of women, has said—­never lie,” she continued.  “One must needs have suffered to know the truth of his observation.  Happily for us, most men know nothing about it; they don’t read us like that dreadful author.”