Dear Paul, I take part in your grief from the bottom of my heart. Allow me, however, to assure you, from the very details of your own letter that your dear mother's illness offers no alarming symptoms whatever. It is one of those painful but harmless crises which the approach of winter brings back upon her almost invariably every year, as you know. Patience therefore, and courage, I beseech you. It requires, my friend, the formal expression of your wishes to induce me to venture upon mingling my petty troubles with your grave solicitude. As you anticipated in your wisdom and in your kind friendship, it was consolation and not advice that I stood in need of when I received your letter. My heart is not at peace, and, what is worse for me, neither is my conscience; and yet, I think I have done my duty. Have I understood it right or not? Judge for yourself. I take up my situation toward Madame de Palme where I had left it in my last letter. The day after our mutual explanation, I took every care to maintain our relations upon the footing of good-fellowship on which they seemed established, and which constituted, in my idea, the only sort of intelligence desirable and even possible between us. It seemed to me, on that day, that she manifested the same vivacity and the same spirit as usual; yet I fancied that her voice and her look, when she addressed me, assumed a meek gravity which is not part of her usual disposition; but on the following days, though I had not deviated from the line of conduct I had marked out for myself, it became impossible for me not to notice that Madame de Palme had lost something of her gayety, and that a vague preoccupation clouded the serenity of her brow. I could see her dancing-partners surprised at her frequent absence of mind; she still followed the whirl, but she no longer led it. Under pretext of fatigue, she would leave suddenly and abruptly her partner's arm, in the midst of a waltz, to go and sit in some corner with a pensive and even a pouting look. If there happened to be a vacant seat next to mine, she threw herself into it, and began from behind her fan some whimsical and disjointed conversation like the following: "If I cannot be a hermit, I am going to become a nun. What would you say, if you saw me enter a convent to-morrow?" "I should say that you would leave it the day after to-morrow." "You have no confidence in my resolutions?" "When they are unwise, no." "I can only form unwise ones, according to you?" "According to me, you waltz admirably. When a person waltzes as you do, it's an art, almost a virtue." "Is it customary to flatter one's friends?" "I am not flattering you. I never speak a single word to you that I have not carefully weighed, and that is not the most earnest expression of my thought. I am a serious man, madam." "It does not seem so when you are with me. I verily believe, however, you have undertaken to make me hate laughter as much as I used to like it."