"Certainly it could. I bet you that Madame de Pënâfiel, meeting you frequently in society, and seeing that you take no pains to be presented to her, will manage, out of pure contradiction, to have it brought about in spite of your opposition." "That would be a triumph to be very proud of,--but I do not believe it will ever happen. In fact, I have so little confidence in it that I will accept your wager, which is this: A month after her return, I shall _not_ have been presented to Madame de Pënâfiel." "But," said De Cernay, "it must be understood that, if such a proposition comes from her, you are not to refuse." "It is so understood," said I, interrupting him. "I certainly would never answer so honourable and flattering a proposal by a rudeness; so, as I repeat to you, I will accept your wager." "Your two hundred louis are as good as mine," said the count as he left me. "But stop a moment," he added, as he held out his hand; "thanks for your frankness." "What frankness?" "What you said about friendship,--your thoughts on the subject which you expressed so bluntly. It shows that you are very honest." "With discretion, or rather dissimulation, honesty is my other virtue," said I, shaking his hand cordially. And so we parted. CHAPTER XV PROJECTS After M. de Cernay had gone, I felt grieved to think of his friendly advances and how I had repulsed them. But what he said about my great attractiveness seemed a ridiculous untruth, and made me distrust him. Then the bitter hatred with which he pursued Madame de Pënâfiel gave me but a poor idea of the kind of a friend he would make. Perhaps I was mistaken, for women, in men's eyes, are outside of the law, if that can be; and the unkind things they say about women to each other, and which they say with a certain self-glorification, in no way injure their reputation as men of honour. M. de Cernay might then have possessed all the good qualities of a warm and steadfast friend; but it was impossible for me to receive him as such, or to behave to him in any other way. I took great satisfaction, too, in having been able to conceal my real nature from him, and to have given him an absolutely false idea, or a singularly indefinite one, of myself. It was always hateful to me to be understood or divined by people I cared nothing about; and for an enemy to do so was dangerous. Indeed, I liked to have even a friend kept out of my secret thoughts. If there is in our moral organisation a culminating point, the source and termination of all our thoughts, our longings, our desires, if we are conscious that any one idea, whether good or evil, is steadily throbbing with every beat of our heart, this palpitating spot is the one that must be most sedulously hidden, most carefully defended from sudden attack, for there is the weak, the sore place, the infallibly vulnerable spot in our nature.