"How pure the night is, and how soft. When I was a child at Sallach, I had a German governess who knew the names of all the stars. She taught me to recognize them. I can find them still: there is the Pole Star and Cassiopeia and the Great Bear and Arcturus and Vega. They are always in the same place. They were there before we were born, and will be after we are dead. Do you ever think of it--that the night looked just the same to Marie Antoinette, Mary Stuart, Cleopatra, all the women who, across the years and the centuries, represent immense disasters, tragic sorrows, and splendid fame? Do you ever think that they have watched this same moon and these stars in the same part of the heavens, and with the same eyes as ours, with the same delight and sadness; and that they have passed away as we shall beneath these motionless stars, eternally indifferent to our joy and misery? When these thoughts come to me, when I think of what poor creatures we are, with all our agonies that cannot move an atom of this immensity, I ask myself what matter our laws, our customs, our prejudices, our vanity in supposing that we are of any importance in this magnificent eternal and impassive universe. I say to myself that there is but one thing of value here below: to satisfy the heart, to feel, to drain every emotion to the bottom, to go to the end of all our desires, in short, to live one's own life, one's real life, free of all lies and conventions, before we sink into the inevitable annihilation." There was something frightful in hearing these nihilistic words on the lips of this beautiful young woman, and on such a night, in such a scene. To the tender and religious Madame Brion these words were all the more painful since they were spoken with the same voice that had directed the croupier where to place the final stake. She greatly admired Ely for that high intelligence which enabled her to read all books, to write in four or five languages, to converse with the most distinguished men and on every subject. Trained until her seventeenth year in the solid German manner, the Baroness Ely had found, at first in the society of the Archduke, then in her life in Italy, an opportunity for an exceptional culture from which her supple mind of a demi-Slave had profited. Alas! of what use was that learning, that facile comprehension, that power of expression, since she had not learned to govern her caprices--as could be seen in the attitude at the roulette table--nor to govern her thoughts--which was too well shown by the sombre creed that she had just confessed? That inner want, among so many gifts and accomplishments, once more oppressed the faithful friend, who had never brought herself to admit the existence of certain ideas in her companion of Sacré-Cœur. And she said:-- "You speak again as though you did not believe in another life. Is it possible that you are sincere?"