The classic tragedy was not so far from nature as hostile critics pretend, when it placed beside its protagonists those personages whose single duty was to receive their confidences. There are in the reality of daily life souls that seem to be but echoes, ever ready to listen to the sighs and moans of others--soul-mirrors whose entire life is in the reflection they receive, whose personality is but the image projected upon them. On her entrance into the convent Louise Brion had become one of this race, whose adorable modesty Shakespeare has embodied in Horatio, the heroic and loyal second in Hamlet's duel with the assassin of his father. At sixteen as at thirty, it was only necessary to look at her to divine the instinctive self-effacement of a timidly sensitive character, incapable of asserting itself, or of living its own life. Her face was a delicate one, but its fineness passed unnoticed, so great was the reserve in her modest features, in her eyes of ashen gray, the simple folds of her brown hair. She spoke but little, and in a voice without accent; she had the genius for simplicity in dress, the style of dress that in the _argot_ of women has the pretty epithet "_tranquille_." Whether man or woman, these beings, so weak and delicate, with their fine shades of sentiment, unfitted for active life, their desires instinctively attenuated, usually attach themselves, in a seeming contradiction which is at bottom logical, to some ardent and impetuous character, whose audacity fascinates them. They feel an irresistible desire to participate, through sympathy and imagination, in the joy and pain which they have not the force to encounter in their own experience. That was the secret of the relations between Madame Brion and the Baroness de Carlsberg. From the first week of their girlish intimacy, the passionate and fantastic Ely had bewitched the reasonable and quiet Louise, and this witchery had continued through the years, gaining from the fact that after their departure from the convent the two friends had once more experienced an analogous misfortune. They had both been in their marriage victims of paternal ambition. Louise Rodier had become Madame Brion, because old Rodier, having fallen into secret difficulties, thought that he could save himself by accepting Horace Brion as a son-in-law and partner. The latter, after his father had been ruined in the Bourse, had, in fifteen energetic years, not only made a fortune, but won a kind of financial fame by re-establishing affairs supposed to be hopeless, such as the Austro-Dalmatian Railway, so feloniously launched and abandoned by the notorious Justus Hafner (vide "Cosmopolis"). To efface the memory of his father Brion needed to ally himself with one of those families of finance whose professional honor is an equivalent of a noble title. The chief of the house of Rodier-Vimal needed an aide-de-camp of distinguished superiority in the secret crisis of his affairs.