“A list of contradictions that prove you _are_ inscrutable, _ma belle_!” observes Chavard, filling up his glass with Roussillion for the fifth time. “I thought _you_ knew us better; it is your trade,” Marguerite says carelessly, peeling a peach whose bloom is less lovely than her own. “I wonder when men who want to win our love will cease to woo us? The prize beyond a woman’s reach is always the most coveted; it has been so since Paradise; it will be so for all eternity!” Her voice sinks lower as she says this, and there is quite a wistful look in her eyes as she turns them towards Delaval, that evinces them to be no affectation, but a true echo of her heart. “Don’t let us talk of love, _ma chère_,” Leonide Leroux breaks in brightly. “It is the wettest blanket in the world. Love may be a charming companion, but we all know it is an intolerable master. It’s like this absinthe, delicious but dangerous; once let it get hold of you--_eh bien!_--the rest I know nothing about, but I have heard it is too terrible!” “I cannot think what the devil people fall in love for,” Ivan Scoboloff murmurs languidly; “it’s an amusement that only suits boys and girls, but after five-and-twenty no sane man would think of such folly.” “And yet I have seen you go in for it, although I fancy you have arrived at a little beyond twenty-five,” Chavard says quietly, with a meaning glance at Leonide Leroux. “I am a girl, but I have never gone in for love,” Rose Marigny cries in her bird-like voice. “That’s well done, Mademoiselle Rose; mind you keep to that. No love is half so sweet as _caramels à la vanille_ or _marrons glacés_,” Mademoiselle Leroux answers, as she piles the above comestibles on her plate. Meanwhile De Belcour joins very little in either conversation or laughter, and grows momentarily more ill at ease. Desperately jealous by nature, it irritates him almost beyond endurance to see Marguerite bestow her attention upon any other man. Hitherto he has hugged to his bosom the notion that she is invariably cold--to him only she has been kind of late, and her kindness has made a great impression on him, simply from its contrast to the capricious manner she has towards others. Is the love which he had begun to persuade himself she bore him nothing but a passing caprice after all--an _amourette_ of an hour--to be abandoned when it has lost the zest of freshness? Irritation, wounded _amour propre_, fierce jealousy, all mingle together in his breast and make a formidable whole when the fear creeps on him that the woman he loves to fatuous stupidity sets so little value on his feelings that she is ready to sacrifice it to the gratification of a passing whim, the transient excitement of a new conquest. For what else, he argues, and not without reason on his side, can prompt her to look and speak to Lord Delaval with eyes and lips that too truly simulate a love she cannot possibly feel for him, stranger as he is?