"You too, Aline!" Eva cried, reproachfully. "Can you consider wealth a blessing? I know perfectly well that others envy me, but if they dreamed what misery this wretched money has brought me, how it daily embitters every enjoyment of life, filling my mind with distrust and suspicion, making me despise those about me, they would give me pity instead of envy. Wherever I go I am received with delight and loaded with courtesies. I? No, my millions! I represent to these sordid souls their idol,--wealth. I am nothing to them but the heiress, and as such beautiful, lovely, talented, fêted and caressed wherever I go. Have I not known this from my earliest childhood? Gray-headed servants cringed and yielded to every wish of the spoiled wayward child, finding all that she did charming and attractive because she was an heiress. Can I be happy in kindness shown not to me but to my money? As soon as I appear in society all the men vie with each other in doing me homage. One flatters me, another exerts all his wit to entertain me, a third sighs and languishes at my feet,--and it is all a lie, all wretched hypocrisy! These very men who flatter and woo me would never accord me a moment's notice if I were poor. Oh it is hard to be obliged to repeat over and over to one's self, 'You yourself are nothing; these wretches adore your millions, not you!' What do they care although I treat them with the greatest arrogance and contempt? I am rich, and all I say and do is charming, and would be although I united in my one character every possible vice. I despise them and show them that I do so, and they adore me! They sue for my hand and not one thinks whether I can be a faithful, loving wife. I bring the man whom I marry millions, and who cares whether a heart accompanies them? The more persistently they pay court to me the more I am humiliated in my own eyes, the more thoroughly I hate these miserable, sordid men! Yes, I hate them so thoroughly that even that vain aristocrat, Count Waldheim, and that _blasé_ fop, Paul Delmar, seem delightful to me, only because I know that they never think of marrying me; they at least are not to be bought with my money. Waldheim's pride of birth protects him from such degradation, and Delmar is richer than I; he wants none of my fortune." "Poor child!" Aline said, sadly. "Yes, you are right now!" Eva continued, with emotion. "I am poor, terribly poor; in the midst of my wealth I am destitute of everything that constitutes happiness. It is a sad fate, indeed, never to be loved for one's self alone!" "Never, Eva?" Aline asked, reproachfully. "Do you mistrust me?" "No, never!" the girl cried. "You and dear old Uncle Balthasar are the only people in the whole world whom I really love and trust with my whole heart,--you two, and perhaps Aunt Minni, who, I think, gives me as much affection as she can spare from her lap-dog Azor. If it were not for you I should be desperate indeed in this cold heartless sordid world!"