So without a moment's hesitation, instead of sympathising with such deep-felt grief, I came to the following conclusions, which, infamous as they were, seemed at the time perfectly probable. Alas! they were all the more dangerous for that very reason. "Being so capricious," said I to myself, "Madame de Pënâfiel is provoked that I have not yet declared myself, not that she cares the least in the world for my devotion, but that it spoils her plans. Though seeing her constantly for the last three months, I have never spoken of love. I cannot discover any other admirer. If what the world says is true, it is not because she is virtuous, but because she delights in mystery. "She wishes to utilise me, and to be revenged for my pretended indifference, by using me as a cloak to hide her real love affair from the eyes of the world. It is a very easy thing,--finding her alone, overwhelmed with sorrow, the least I can do is to ask the cause of her distress, to offer what consolation I can, and thus to be led on to a declaration which would suit her plans, and make me her plaything. "Or else, having discovered my sadness, and the spells of melancholy I often succumb to and of which I never speak, she simulates this fit of despair, so that from sympathy, I will be led to some misanthropic confessions about my lost illusions, my sad soul, etc., perhaps other things more ridiculous still, and then she means to deride my sentimental maunderings." Now when I was once firmly convinced of such suppositions, I declared that nothing I could say would be too outrageous. I would show her that I would not submit to be used as her tool. All these reasons were completely absurd, these cowardly, underhand motives. Now that I can calmly think it over, I wonder why I never thought that, to have arranged such a scene, she needed to be sure of the day and the hour of my visit, and that to take me as a cloak to hide another affection would compromise her as surely as the liaison she endeavoured to hide, finally, that the mere pleasure of forcing a confession of my trials, which I had the good sense to keep to myself, would certainly not be worth such a clever piece of dissimulation. But when it is a question of monomania (and I think that my intense distrust amounted to monomania), wise and sensible ideas are the last that ever come into our minds.