While these gentlemen worshipped her, Carter hoped she would get sea-sick. This great, brawny, boisterous, domineering, heroic fighter had just enough moral vitality to know when he was in danger of falling, and to wish for safety. Those were perilous hours at evening, when the ship swept steadily through a lulling whisper of waters, when a trail of foamy phosphorescense, like a transitory Milky Way, followed in pursuit, when a broad bar of rippling light ran straight out to the setting moon, when the decks were deserted except by slumberers, and Mrs. Larue persisted in dallying. The temptation of darkness, the temptation of solitude, the fever which begins to turn sleepless brains at midnight, made this her possible hour of coquettish conquest. She varied from delicately phrased sentimentalities to hoydenish physical impertinences. He was not permitted for five minutes together to forget that she was a bodily, as well as a spiritual presence. He was not checked in any transitory license of speech or gesture. Meantime she quoted fine rhapsodies from Balzac, and repeated telling situations from Dumas le Jeune, and commented on both in the interest of the _sainte passion de l'amour_. Once, after a few moments of silence and revery, she said with an air of earnest feeling, "Is it not a horrible fate for a woman--solitude? Do you not pity me? Thirty years old, a widow, and childless! No one to love; no right to love any one." She changed into French now, as she frequently did when she was animated and wished to express herself freely. Such talk as this sounds unnatural in the language of the Anglo-Saxon, but is not so unbecoming to the tongue of the Gauls. "A woman to whom the affections are forbidden, is deprived of the use of more than half her being. Whatever her possibilities, she is denied all expansion beyond a certain limit. She may not explore, much less use, her own heart. It contains chambers of joy which she can only guess of, and into which she must not enter. There is a nursery of affections there, but she can only stand with her ear to the door, trying to hear the sweet prattle within. There is an innermost chapel, with an altar all set for the communion of love, but no priest to invite her to the holy banquet. She is capable of a mother's everlasting devotion, but she scarcely dares suspect it. She is fitted to enter upon the tender mysteries of wifehood, and yet she is constantly fearing that she shall never meet a man whom she can love. That is the old maid, horrible name! The widow is less ashamed, but she is more unhappy. She has been taught her possibilities, and then suddenly forbidden the use of them." Had the Colonel been acquainted with Michelet and his fellow rhapsodists on women, he might have suspected Madame of a certain amount of plagiarism. But he only thought her amazingly clever, at the same time that he was unable to answer her in her own style.