“Why should you take an interest in me? I am only a poor artist, and quite below _your_ notice,” she answers, with a sort of proud humility. “You would not say that if you knew how much I have thought about you, _how_ your face has haunted me. It has bewitched me--_malgre moi_--I think. Do you know, Mademoiselle Ange, that if I am like someone you knew, you are strangely like someone I have seen; someone who certainly was not so beautiful as you are, or I should remember her to my cost,” he adds softly. She flushes still deeper as she listens, then turns the subject by saying lightly: “And what am I to tell you about myself? Only that I have a great deal of admiration and very little love! Perhaps you will think that is all I ought to expect, being myself! But really I don’t believe anyone has ever _loved me_!” “It would indeed, be strange if they hadn’t,” he replies, unable to remove his gaze from her. “You are deceiving yourself or deceiving _me_. You are not one to be seen and not loved--_madly loved_! No matter the dire results of it!” he cries eagerly, and her lids droop under the infinite passion of his eyes. “It is very hard to tell the real from the sham in love, and in everything else I don’t take the trouble to try; I class them all together, and value them at just as much as they are worth,” she says with a low laugh. “You asked me which of them I liked best--no _one_; but somehow, though I only saw you two nights ago, _you_ seem to stand apart from the rest, you are different _to me_! You won’t be ashamed to come here now and then? I am not a _grande duchesse_, but still----” “I’ll come till you tire of me. I am afraid that will be _too soon_. You women are so capricious, especially lovely ones.” “To everyone else, perhaps, but _never to you_!” she almost whispers, looking right into his eyes now with a yearning, wistful look that might make him lose his head, and he feels already that the best thing he can do is not to see Mademoiselle Ange again. But what man has the strength of mind to resist a sudden and violent passion like this? He thinks, as he gazes infatuated on her, of some splendidly plumaged bird, of a mirage in the desert, of heavily scented exotics, of burning skies, or rather he _feels_ all this, for her prerogative is to inspire sensation. To look at her is a species of moral dram drinking, and she stands in comparison to better, purer women, women like Zai, as brandy stands to weak wine and water. “If Rubens had seen this girl,” Delaval says to himself, “he would not have sent down for all time a burlesque upon this splendid red and white, this fleshly magnificence!” “Do you know I had an instinct when I saw you the other night? I believed you were my fate,” she says in a dreamy voice, but so suddenly that he starts a little. It _is_ startling to think that he should in any way be connected with the fate of this exquisite woman.