The resemblance of the two sisters tortured me. This little Marthe, with her luxurious and appetizing color, her warm pink cheeks and moist lips; this plump adolescent whose short skirt shows her curving calves, is an affecting picture of what Marie was. It is a sort of terrible revelation. In truth Marthe resembles, more than the Marie of to-day does, the Marie whom I formerly loved; the Marie who came out of the unknown, whom I saw one evening sitting on the rose-tree seat, shining, silent--in the presence of love. It required a great effort on my part not to try, weakly and vainly, to approach Marthe--the impossible dream, the dream of dreams! She has a little love affair with a youngster hardly molted into adolescence, and rather absurd, whom one catches sight of now and again as he slips away from her side; and that day when she sang so much in spite of herself, it was because a little rival was ill. I am as much a stranger to her girlish growing triumph and to her thoughts as if I were her enemy! One morning when she was capering and laughing, flower-crowned, at the doorstep, she looked to me like a being from another world. * * * * * * One winter's day, when Marie had gone out and I was arranging my papers, I found a letter I had written not long before, but had not posted, and I threw the useless document on the fire. When Marie came back in the evening, she settled herself in front of the fire to dry herself, and to revive it for the room's twilight; and the letter, which had been only in part consumed, took fire again. And suddenly there gleamed in the night a shred of paper with a shred of my writing--"_I love you as much as you love me_!" And it was so clear, the inscription that flamed in the darkness, that it was not worth while even to attempt an explanation. We could not speak, nor even look at each other! In the fatal communion of thought which seized us just then, we turned aside from each other, even shadow-veiled as we were. We fled from the truth! In these great happenings we become strangers to each other for the reason that we never knew each other profoundly. We are vaguely separated on earth from everybody else, but we are mightily distant from our nearest. * * * * * * After all these things, my former life resumed its indifferent course. Certainly I am not so unhappy as they who have the bleeding wound of a bereavement or remorse, but I am not so delighted with life as I once hoped to be. Ah, men's love and women's beauty are too short-lived in this world; and yet, is it not only thereby that we and they exist? It might be said that love, so pure a thing, the only one worth while in life, is a crime, since it is always punished sooner or later. I do not understand. We are a pitiful lot; and everywhere about us--in our movements, within our walls, and from hour to hour, there is a stifling mediocrity. Fate's face is gray.