The elbow-nudgings and the leer at her love-ecstasies--nay, at the very manner in which she had hidden the only small defect of her figure; the display of all her bodily habits; the jibes at the little reliances on the arts of her dressing-table; the sneers at the coming little threat of wrinkles, at the grey threads of hairs amongst the glorious nut-brown masses--tshah! She had been a mad fool to love a man twelve years her junior! Poor fool, she blamed _herself_! It was one of those books that are written by such men as batten, parasitic, louse-like, upon a woman. And this one not only battened upon her means, but upon her reputation, her honour, her affections, her very soul. Merely to be rich is to live in the most vulgar state of poverty. There have been colossal sneaks in the world of letters, that have not been without genius--Rousseau, de Musset, and the rest--though their genius has been somewhat rotten at the core. We read every line of Rousseau with suspicion, for is there not haunting every line he wrote, threading in and out through all, the ignominy of the dirty little caddish soul that slimes the pages of his _Confessions_? And what man does not feel his sex outraged by the hermaphroditic venom of de Musset as he sullies the frail love of George Sand? To betray the woman whose sole folly has been that she loved you! Even though but for a gadding while. A woman can give a man nothing greater than the love of her life--that is the weightiest dower. It is beyond a price. The sentences that can only be whispered--the sentences that cannot be whispered--the tendernesses--the surrenders--the endearments--the mystic emotions that reach in the love of man and woman the nearest to some ecstatic conception of the mystery of life, that are the worthy beginnings of a new life, these things can only be lived; they cannot be spoken of even by the most reverent tongue; but when their exposure is made the foul weapon with which to wound the woman for her only fault in having surrendered herself to an egregious cad, that cad is only fit to be spat upon. The betrayal of the Christ was to this a healthy sin. Such a dirty rogue should be blotted out. The wit of such a man must stink--if he have wit. The art of such a man must be a foul sore. The influence of such a man must be a filthy disease; his companionship a loathsome suppuration; his life a paltry ignominy. Marguerite Olmé brushed back her hair from her brow with the wondrous hands that were as eloquent as her voice. She was stunned with shame. She uttered a little moan, when she should have answered a light knock at the door. Her maid entered: “Madame--it is time to dress for the play--it is the first night of----” “Hush, Ernestine!” she said hoarsely; and the girl was startled at the voice. “Madame is ill?” The girl ran to her as to a child. “No----” The wounded woman stroked the girl’s shoulders, and signed to a desk; the maid brought her pen and ink and paper.