Such women as she, with hair of a pale gold, almost wavy, with slender hands and feet, with a tapering figure, and dainty gestures, seem destined to allow their faintest impressions to appear on the surface, one judges them to be so vibrant and quivering. On the contrary, it is generally the case that no one can be more secretive than such creatures, all delicacy and all emotion as they are. Their very excess of nervousness becomes in them a source of strength. From their first experience of the world they comprehend to what degree the acuteness of their sensations renders them exceptional, solitary beings. By one of those instincts of self-defence which the moral nature possesses no less than the physical nature, they manœuvre so as to conceal their hearts, in order that life may not brutalize them. They become, as it were, ashamed of their emotions. They hold their peace, at first concerning the most profound of them, then concerning the most superficial. And thus they end by developing a power of external impassiveness which adds to their charm the attractive force of an enigma, especially as this intentional dualism, this constant watch upon themselves, this prolonged contrast between what they show and what they feel, between their real personality and avowed personality, does not fail to exert some influence even on their manner of feeling and thinking. They are capable of the nicest shades of discrimination, even to subtlety, when they are pure; and, if they are not pure, even to stratagem, for the fascination or the despair of the man who falls in love with them, according as he, in his turn, is very complex or very simple. Landri de Claviers-Grandchamp was both, for reasons which were connected with the peculiar features of his destiny. Thus he had already suffered much through that woman, and still had owed to her the most delicious hours that his youth, darkened by an inborn and acquired melancholy, had ever known. The first words exchanged between him and Madame Olier will enable us to understand why, and at the same time what dangerous, almost unhuman, chimeras can suggest themselves to a scrupulous sentimental woman like Valentine, who loves love and fears it, who cannot determine either to deprive herself of an affection that is dear to her, or to sacrifice her self-esteem by abandoning herself to it, who becomes agitated without losing her head, and whose pulses throb without causing her to abdicate her reason.