I look first to your gallantry, my dear Alcide, to see that this statement is not misconstrued. That I have a past argues nothing of my remoteness from it. In comparison with the immortality which is surely to be mine, everything on this side is youth. I am seventeen, or thirty-seven, or whatever I choose; and I intend that Heaven, whenever it calls me, shall find me irresistible. Possessing all the ages, it cannot grudge me my arbitrary disposition of my own little term. Now, tell your friends, my dear Alcide, that to succeed in life one must never ask a woman her age or a man his intentions; and so we shall all be comfortable. I owe my mother the most whimsical of grudges, my existence. I will nickname her the Comtesse de l’Ombre, and so shall abuse no confidences in relating of my debt to her, and to “Lovelace,” her collaborator in the romance of which I am the heroine. She was very beautiful; and he, an English cadet of distinction, was an aristocratic paragon. At the age of sixteen, convinced of the hollowness of life, she had taken the veil, and become the Sister Agnès of the Communauté de Madelonnettes, Notre Dame de la Charité, in Paris, whence a year later she was transferred to an English branch of the house. Hence and from her duty my father, whom she had approached upon a begging mission, succeeded unhappily in inveigling her. To the day of her death my mother bore the disfiguring sign of a little cross on her breast. It has succeeded to me, but in a faint reflection, a _grain de beauté_, only. I will tell you, in a word, the story of my inheritance. The ladies of les Madelonnettes had, in inviting all the feminine vices to their inauguration ceremony, with the object to pension them off handsomely, overlooked the bad fairy Jealousy. Thou knowest, Alcide, the meanness of this witch. To revenge herself, she cast Lovelace into their midst, as Eris cast the apple of discord upon the nuptial board of Thetis; and poor de l’Ombre was made the consequent scapegoat. Driven forth in ignominy from the fold, she could not suffer so much but that one, over zealous or jealous, must strike her an envious blow across the bosom, on which she always wore a little crucifix, the gift of her father. The ebony cut in and left an indelible scar, to which I was to succeed in pathetic earnest of my origin. It has never ceased to be a symbol to me of the vanity of self-renunciation. How can we deny our_selves_, and not deny One after whose image we are made?