“These were admirable tactics. She was bewitching in this transition of feeling, indispensable to the situation in which she wished to place herself in regard to me. I fell into the attitude, the manners, and the look of a man so deeply distressed, that I saw her too newly assumed dignity giving way; she looked at me, took my hand, drew me along almost, threw me on the sofa, but quite gently, and said after a moment’s silence, ‘I am dreadfully unhappy, my dear fellow. Do you love me?’—‘Oh! yes.’—‘Well, then, what will become of you?’” At this point the women all looked at each other. “Though I can still suffer when I recall her perfidy, I still laugh at her expression of entire conviction and sweet satisfaction that I must die, or at any rate sink into perpetual melancholy,” de Marsay went on. “Oh! do not laugh yet!” he said to his listeners; “there is better to come. I looked at her very tenderly after a pause, and said to her, ‘Yes, that is what I have been wondering.’—‘Well, what will you do?’—‘I asked myself that the day after my cold.’—‘And——?’ she asked with eager anxiety.—‘And I have made advances to the little lady to whom I was supposed to be attached.’ “Charlotte started up from the sofa like a frightened doe, trembling like a leaf, gave me one of those looks in which women forgo all their dignity, all their modesty, their refinement, and even their grace, the sparkling glitter of a hunted viper’s eye when driven into a corner, and said, ‘And I have loved this man! I have struggled! I have——’ On this last thought, which I leave you to guess, she made the most impressive pause I ever heard.—‘Good God!’ she cried, ‘how unhappy are we women! we never can be loved. To you there is nothing serious in the purest feelings. But never mind; when you cheat us you still are our dupes!’—‘I see that plainly,’ said I, with a stricken air; ‘you have far too much wit in your anger for your heart to suffer from it.’—This modest epigram increased her rage; she found some tears of vexation. ‘You disgust me with the world and with life.’ she said; ‘you snatch away all my illusions; you deprave my heart.’