"Mademoiselle, you are unjust. I never pretended to love you. I had a sincere affection for you, and I have it still. I admit that your beauty, your wit, and your talents fully entitle you to look for more than fraternal friendship from those who see you every day. But my situation, and my duties to my family preclude my indulging any other feeling for you without being dishonourable. I tell you frankly that I think you are charming, and I assure you that in restricting my sentiments towards you within the limits imposed by loyalty, I have not been without merit. I see nothing humiliating for you in that; what might, indeed, humiliate you, mademoiselle, would be the determined pursuit of a man determined not to marry you." She gave me an evil look. "What do you know about it?" she said. "Every man is not a fortune-hunter." "Oh! mademoiselle, are you a spiteful little person?" I said, very calmly. "If so, I will wish you good-day." "M. Maxime!" she cried, rushing forward to stop me, "forgive me! have pity on me! Alas! I am so unhappy. Imagine what must be the thoughts of a poor creature like me, who has been given—cruelly—a heart, a soul, a brain ... and who can only use them to suffer ... and to hate! What is my life? What is my future? My life is the perception of my poverty, ceaselessly aggravated by the luxury which surrounds me! My future will be to regret, some day, to weep bitterly for even this life—this slave’s life, odious as it is! You talk of my youth, my wit, and my talents. Would that I had never had the capacity for anything higher than breaking stones on the road! I should have been happier. My talents! I shall have passed the best part of my life in decking another woman with them, and giving her thereby additional beauty, power—and insolence. And when my best blood has passed into this doll’s veins, she will go off on the arm of a happy husband to take her part in the best pleasures of life, while, old, solitary, and deserted, I shall go to die in some hole with the pension of a lady’s maid. What have I done to deserve this fate, tell me that? Why should it be mine rather than that of those other women? Because I am not as good as they are? If I am bad, it is because suffering has envenomed me, because injustice has blackened my soul. I was born with a disposition as great as theirs—perhaps greater—to be good and loving and charitable. My God! benefits cost little when you’re rich, and kindness is easy when you’re happy. If I were in their place, and they in mine, they would hate me ... as I hate them.... We do not love our masters. Ah! this is horrible—what I am saying to you. I know it, and this is the crowning bitterness—I feel my own degradation, I blush for it ... and increase it. Alas! now you despise me more than ever ... you, whom I could have loved so much, if you would have let me; you, who could have given me all that I have lost hope, peace, goodness, self-respect! Ah! there was