"It had a great effect, too, that I was always travelling: travelling often keeps one colder. When I look toward the coast, and think that a great Roman was now in Baja, now in Germany, now in Gaul, now in Rome, and that to him the earth was a great city, then I easily comprehend how to him men became masses. Travelling is an employment that we women always miss. Men have always something to do, and send the soul outward; women must stay all day at home with their hearts. In Switzerland I (as the Princess Idoine does) imposed upon myself a little economy, and I know how by means of little objects which one daily attains one consoles one's self for the high one which lies, like a god's throne, on an eminence. "So I came just in this still week of life to the mer-de-glace in _Montanvert_. Of picturesque mountains, plains, dells, I had seen my fill in Spain, and of ice-mountains in Switzerland. But a sea of ice at that height, a solitary, primeval, blue-green sea surrounded with red rocks, a broad waste full of restless, upheaving, tempestuous billows, which a sudden death, a Medusa's head, had so, in the midst of life, frozen stiff and fast! At that time a storm, which at any other time would have been frightful to me, swept up the mountain with flames; I hardly noticed it, my soul hung musingly on the stillness of a petrified storm, on the repose of--ice! I shuddered, wept unusually all the way down the mountain, and the same week laid my economical play-work aside and continued my travels. "I made, however, no storm-prayers, but dwelt down below there without complaint in the rainy hollow of a dark, cold existence. Then fate brought me to Epomeo, and there the gods willed that the scene should be changed. "But now it must remain as it is. When a singular being has said to a singular being, 'Thou art the one!' then do they exist only through and for each other. The Psyche with her lamp will not feel it, if the lamp catches and consumes her locks and her hand and her heart, while she blissfully gazes upon the slumbering Cupid; but when the hot drop of oil escapes from the lamp and touches the god, and he awakes and angrily flies away from her forever--forever--Ah, thou poor Psyche! Of what avail to thee is death in the dissolved ice-sea? Has, then, no man ever yet experienced the pain of lost love, that he may know what a thousand times harder desolation it inflicts upon a woman? Who of them has fidelity, the genuine, which is neither a virtue nor a sensation, but the very fire which eternally animates and sustains the kernel of existence?