man!"

Eleven was striking by all the clocks, and the guests went home on
foot along the seashore.

"Still, that is not life," said Mademoiselle des Touches. "That woman
was one of the rarest, and perhaps the most extraordinary exceptions
in intellect--a pearl! Life is made up of various incidents, of pain
and pleasure alternately. The Paradise of Dante, that sublime
expression of the ideal, that perpetual blue, is to be found only in
the soul; to ask it of the facts of life is a luxury against which
nature protests every hour. To such souls as those the six feet of a
cell, and the kneeling chair are all they need."

"You are right," said Leon de Lora; "but good-for-nothing as I may be,
I cannot help admiring a woman who is capable, as that one was, of
living by the side of a studio, under a painter's roof, and never
coming down, nor seeing the world, nor dipping her feet in the street
mud."

"Such a thing has been known--for a few months," said Claude Vignon,
with deep irony.

"Comtesse Honorine is not unique of her kind," replied the Ambassador
to Mademoiselle des Touches. "A man, nay, and a politician, a bitter
writer, was the object of such a passion; and the pistol shot which
killed him hit not him alone; the woman who loved lived like a nun
ever after."

"Then there are yet some great souls in this age!" said Camille