These manoeuvres, planned in cold blood, but enchantingly executed, carved her image deeper and deeper on the soul of that great writer and thinker whom she revelled in making childlike, confiding, simple, and almost silly beside her. And yet she had moments of repulsion against her own act, moments in which she could not help admiring the grandeur of such simplicity. This game of choicest coquetry attached her, insensibly, to her slave. At last, however, Diane grew impatient with an Epictetus of love; and when she thought she had trained him to the utmost credulity, she set to work to tie a thicker bandage still over his eyes. CHAPTER IV. THE CONFESSION OF A PRETTY WOMAN One evening Daniel found the princess thoughtful, one elbow resting on a little table, her beautiful blond head bathed in light from the lamp. She was toying with a letter which lay on the table-cloth. When d’Arthez had seen the paper distinctly, she folded it up, and stuck it in her belt. “What is the matter?” asked d’Arthez; “you seem distressed.” “I have received a letter from Monsieur de Cadignan,” she replied. “However great the wrongs he has done me, I cannot help thinking of his exile--without family, without son--from his native land.” These words, said in a soulful voice, betrayed angelic sensibility. D’Arthez was deeply moved. The curiosity of the lover became, so to speak, a psychological and literary curiosity. He wanted to know the height that woman had attained, and what were the injuries she thus forgave; he longed to know how these women of the world, taxed with frivolity, cold-heartedness, and egotism, could be such angels. Remembering how the princess had already repulsed him when he first tried to read that celestial heart, his voice, and he himself, trembled as he took the transparent, slender hand of the beautiful Diane with its curving finger-tips, and said,-- “Are we now such friends that you will tell me what you have suffered?” “Yes,” she said, breathing forth the syllable like the most mellifluous note that Tulou’s flute had ever sighed. Then she fell into a revery, and her eyes were veiled. Daniel remained in a state of anxious expectation, impressed with the solemnity of the occasion. His poetic imagination made him see, as it were, clouds slowly dispersing and disclosing to him the sanctuary where the wounded lamb was kneeling at the divine feet. “Well?” he said, in a soft, still voice. Diane looked at the tender petitioner; then she lowered her eyes slowly, dropping their lids with a movement of noble modesty. None but a monster would have been capable of imagining hypocrisy in the graceful undulation of the neck with which the princess again lifted her charming head, to look once more into the eager eyes of that great man.