Hearing this revelation, dragged from her sister’s heart by the violence of the storm she herself had raised there, the countess looked with stupefied eyes at the banker’s wife; her tears stopped, and her eyes grew fixed. “Are you in misery as well, my dearest?” she said, in a low voice. “My griefs will not ease yours.” “But tell them to me, darling; I am not yet too selfish to listen. Are we to suffer together once more, as we did in girlhood?” “But alas! we suffer apart,” said the banker’s wife. “You and I live in two worlds at enmity with each other. I go to the Tuileries when you are not there. Our husbands belong to opposite parties. I am the wife of an ambitious banker,--a bad man, my darling; while you have a noble, kind, and generous husband.” “Oh! don’t reproach me!” cried the countess. “To understand my position, a woman must have borne the weariness of a vapid and barren life, and have entered suddenly into a paradise of light and love; she must know the happiness of feeling her whole life in that of another; of espousing, as it were, the infinite emotions of a poet’s soul; of living a double existence,--going, coming with him in his courses through space, through the world of ambition; suffering with his griefs, rising on the wings of his high pleasures, developing her faculties on some vast stage; and all this while living calm, serene, and cold before an observing world. Ah! dearest, what happiness in having at all hours an enormous interest, which multiplies the fibres of the heart and varies them indefinitely! to feel no longer cold indifference! to find one’s very life depending on a thousand trifles!--on a walk where an eye will beam to us from a crowd, on a glance which pales the sun! Ah! what intoxication, dear, to live! to _live_ when other women are praying on their knees for emotions that never come to them! Remember, darling, that for this poem of delight there is but a single moment,--youth! In a few years winter comes, and cold. Ah! if you possessed these living riches of the heart, and were threatened with the loss of them--” Madame du Tillet, terrified, had covered her face with her hands during the passionate utterance of this anthem.