"You have not been here," Bertha continued, "since you went away on your wedding journey. You were nineteen or twenty then,--only a girl." "I was young," said Mrs. Sylvestre, "but I was rather mature for my years. I did not feel as if I was exactly a girl." Then she added, in a lower voice: "I had experienced something which had ripened me." "You mean," said Bertha, "that you knew what love was." She had not intended to say the words, and their abrupt directness grated upon her as she spoke; but she could not have avoided uttering them. Mrs. Sylvestre paused a moment. "The experience I passed through," she said, "did not belong to my age. It was not a girl's feelings. I think it came too soon." "You had two alternatives to choose from," said Bertha,--"that it should come too soon or too late." Mrs. Sylvestre paused again. "You do not think," she said, "that it ever comes to any one at the right time?" Bertha had been sitting with her hands folded about her knee. She unclasped and clasped them with a sharply vehement movement. "It is a false thing from beginning to end," she said. "I do not believe in it." "Ah," said Mrs. Sylvestre, softly, "I believe it. I wish I did not." "What is there to be gained by it?" said Bertha; "a feeling that is not to be reasoned about or controlled; a miserable, feverish emotion you cannot understand, and can only resent and struggle against blindly. When you let it conquer you, how can you respect yourself or the object of it? What do women love men for? Who knows? It is like madness! All you can say is, 'I love him. He is life or death to me.' It is so unreasoning--so unreasoning." She stopped suddenly, as if all at once she became conscious that her companion was looking at herself instead of at the fire. "You love a man generally," said Mrs. Sylvestre, in her tenderly modulated voice,--"at least I have thought so,--because he is the one human creature who is capable of causing you the greatest amount of suffering. I don't know of any other reason, and I have thought of it a great deal." "It is a good reason," said Bertha,--"a good reason." Then she laughed. "This is just a little tragic, isn't it?" she said. "What a delightfully emotional condition we must be in to have reached tragedy in less than five minutes, and entirely without intention! I did not come to be tragic; I came to be analytical. I want you to tell me carefully how we strike you." "We?" said Mrs. Sylvestre. Bertha touched herself on the breast. "We," she said,--"I, Richard, Laurence Arbuthnot, Colonel Tredennis, Senator Planefield, the two hundred men callers,--Washington, in short. How does Washington strike you, now that you have come to it again?" "Won't you give me two weeks to reflect upon it?" said Agnes. "No. I want impressions, not reflections. Is it all very much changed?" "I am very much changed," was the reply. "And we?" said Bertha. "Suppose--suppose you begin with Laurence Arbuthnot."