"The remaining hours were intolerable. No sooner had the musique 'all opened than I took my seat, but the exasperating entertainment appeared to me to endure for æons before her turn. The torments, inflicted on my suspense by a pair of cross-talk comedians, cannot be surpassed in hell. "At last I trembled in the cul-de-sac again. At last she came! "With an obeisance that consigned my career to her feet, I murmured, 'I am here to learn whether I am pardoned.' "_Not a syllable! As before, she passed me by._ "Ah, mon Dieu! I cannot tell you how I reached my couch. "But my zeal survived even this. I was stricken, but indomitable. I said, 'Behold a saint worth winning!' I said 'Brace up, and demonstrate that you are worthy of her!' "My friend, every day for a month I thumbed that exhausting dictionary, and a Spanish Grammar, that I might send to her a sonnet every night. For thirty days on end I wrestled with synonyms and inversions in a foreign tongue, to create for her a nightly proof of my genius and my love. "And I waited for an answer vainly. "Long after despair had mastered me, I was with a good-for-nothing painter of my acquaintance. He said, 'I have a new flame--delicious. Have you heard of the Spanish dancer up at the Little Casino?' "By a superhuman effort I controlled myself. 'Your suit prospers?' "'It is going strong. And only a week since I first dropped in there and saw her!' "'You are a man of action! But since when have you talked Spanish?' "'Oh, that isn't necessary,' he laughed; 'she is Spanish only on the stage. Between ourselves, her name is really Marie Durand--she has never been out of France in her life.' "_She had not understood a single word that I had said, or written--and by the time I discovered it, she was another's_! He holds her still--you hear him now." The "interpreter" was speaking again: "Señorita Naranjo desires me to translate----" XI THE GIRL WHO WAS TIRED OF LOVE At the Opéra Ball, a boy had danced half the night with a partner whose youthful tones were so delicious, whose tenderness was so attractive, that he implored her a hundred times to unmask. "If I do, you'll get up and go away," she gasped at last, fondling his hand. He vowed that it was her temperament that fascinated him, and she took the mask off--and he saw the sunken face of an old, old woman. Horrified, he left her. In the same season, another man supplicated to a girl for her love--a girl with a face so beautiful that it made him forget the strangeness of her voice, which was flat and feeble. And the girl, who looked no more than nineteen, replied with exhaustion: "I outlived such emotions long ago. To tell you the truth, the subject sounds to me ridiculous. All I want to-day is peace and quiet." Wearily she left him.