"Oh! it is a very simple story, without any crime in it, any violence." "Then what really happened?" "Almost nothing. Many courtesans were born to be virtuous women, they say; and many women called virtuous were born to be courtesans--is that not so? Now, Madame Samoris, who was born a courtesan, had a daughter born a virtuous woman, that's all." "I don't quite understand you." "I'll explain what I mean. The Comtesse Samoris is one of those tinsel foreign women hundreds of whom are rained down every year on Paris. A Hungarian or Wallachian countess, or I know not what, she appeared one winter in apartments she had taken in the Champs Elysees, that quarter for adventurers and adventuresses, and opened her drawing-room to the first comer or to anyone that turned up. "I went there. Why? you will say. I really can't tell you. I went there, as everyone goes to such places because the women are facile and the men are dishonest. You know that set composed of filibusters with varied decorations, all noble, all titled, all unknown at the embassies, with the exception of those who are spies. All talk of their honor without the slightest occasion for doing so, boast of their ancestors, tell you about their lives, braggarts, liars, sharpers, as dangerous as the false cards they have up their sleeves, as delusive as their name--in short, the aristocracy of the bagnio. "I adore these people. They are interesting to study, interesting to know, amusing to understand, often clever, never commonplace like public functionaries. Their wives are always pretty, with a slight flavor of foreign roguery, with the mystery of their existence, half of it perhaps spent in a house of correction. They have, as a rule, magnificent eyes and incredible hair. I adore them also. "Madame Samoris is the type of these adventuresses, elegant, mature, and still beautiful. Charming feline creatures, you feel that they are vicious to the marrow of their bones. You find them very amusing when you visit them; they give card-parties; they have dances and suppers; in short, they offer you all the pleasures of social life. "And she had a daughter--a tall, fine-looking girl, always ready for entertainments, always full of laughter and reckless gayety--a true adventuress's daughter--but, at the same time, an innocent, unsophisticated, artless girl, who saw nothing, knew nothing, understood nothing of all the things that happened in her father's house." "How do you know about him?"