“Love, my dear,” replied Granville, with a sort of ironical surprise, “you are incapable of understanding it. The cold sky of Normandy is not that of Spain. This difference of climate is no doubt the secret of our disaster.--To yield to our caprices, to guess them, to find pleasure in pain, to sacrifice the world’s opinion, your pride, your religion even, and still regard these offerings as mere grains of incense burnt in honor of the idol--that is love--” “The love of ballet-girls!” cried the Countess in horror. “Such flames cannot last, and must soon leave nothing but ashes and cinders, regret or despair. A wife ought, in my opinion, to bring you true friendship, equable warmth--” “You speak of warmth as negroes speak of ice,” retorted the Count, with a sardonic smile. “Consider that the humblest daisy has more charms than the proudest and most gorgeous of the red hawthorns that attract us in spring by their strong scent and brilliant color.--At the same time,” he went on, “I will do you justice. You have kept so precisely in the straight path of imaginary duty prescribed by law, that only to make you understand wherein you have failed towards me, I should be obliged to enter into details which would offend your dignity, and instruct you in matters which would seem to you to undermine all morality.” “And you dare to speak of morality when you have but just left the house where you have dissipated your children’s fortune in debaucheries?” cried the Countess, maddened by her husband’s reticence. “There, madame, I must correct you,” said the Count, coolly interrupting his wife. “Though Mademoiselle de Bellefeuille is rich, it is at nobody’s expense. My uncle was master of his fortune, and had several heirs. In his lifetime, and out of pure friendship, regarding her as his niece, he gave her the little estate of Bellefeuille. As for anything else, I owe it to his liberality--” “Such conduct is only worthy of a Jacobin!” said the sanctimonious Angelique. “Madame, you are forgetting that your own father was one of the Jacobins whom you scorn so uncharitably,” said the Count severely. “Citizen Bontems was signing death-warrants at a time when my uncle was doing France good service.” Madame de Granville was silenced. But after a short pause, the remembrance of what she had just seen reawakened in her soul the jealousy which nothing can kill in a woman’s heart, and she murmured, as if to herself--“How can a woman thus destroy her own soul and that of others?”