astonished at her art--very peculiar to her sex and to worldly experience at once--of concealing the fact, that she both--endured and despised. The Evangelist's example brought it about that Victor, too, began to phosphoresce at all points of his soul; the spark of wit ran round the whole circle of his ideas, which, like Graces, clasped each other by the hand, and his electrical chime of bells outdid the Page's discharges, which were lightnings, and stank of brimstone. Clotilda, who was very observing, mistrusted Sebastian's lips and heart. The young nobleman held him to be one of his feather, and in love with Clotilda; and that, on the ground that "the gayer or more earnest tone into which a man fell in company was a sign that a female electrical-eel had struck at his bosom." I must confess it,--Victor's effervescent soul never allowed him to hit that expression of respect for women which does not run into untimely tenderness, and for which he often envied cultivated people of the world; his regard unfortunately always looked like a declaration of love. The Chamberlain's lady accounted him as false as her Cicisbeo.[50] People like her cannot comprehend any other kind attentions than polite or artful ones. They kept our hero over there all day and half the evening. Not once in the whole day was he able,--although the invisible eyes of his inner man stood full of tears at Clotilda's noble figure, at her secret grief for her cold, buried friend, at her thrilling voice when she merely spoke to Agatha,--for all that, he never found himself able to say so much as an earnest word: toward strangers his nature always impelled him in the beginning to make sundry satirical leaps and other caprioles. But in the evening, when they were in the festal garden, where his usual shudder at the emptiness of life was made more intense by merriment, as it always was,--whereas serious, sad, passionate conversations diminished it,--and when Clotilda granted him only a very cold civility, as if shown to him at a father's dictation, and did not divine in its full extent the difference between him and Matthieu, who assumed no second world, nor any inner man organically adapted to it: then was there a stifled feeling about his yearning heart; too many tears seemed to fill his whole breast and press for a passage; and as often as he looked up to the great, deep heavens, something whispered in his soul: Take not the least thought for the fine circle, but speak out!