"You know yourself well, madame!" she said. "No, surely my brother would fare no better with you, though that was not what I meant to ask. I thought, in my folly, that, perhaps, in the life of such a one as you, there might come moments when you longed to be other than you are, moments when you would like to think that among all the men you have played with, ruined, and spurned, there were one or two who could speak and think of you as men speak and think of honest women, who could say that you had been an ennobling influence in their lives, and whose word would count upon the side of good when you come to answer for the evil you have done. I thought that, not for money's sake or vanity's, you might wish to win my brother from this woman, and, when you had won him, teach him how sordid, how wicked, how futile such a life is, and send him back to decency--a better man! I see how mistaken I was in judging you. There is no compassion in you, no nobler instinct than self-interest. Your motives are the same as hers, love of admiration and love of gold,--and, perhaps, less worthy. I cannot say. Hers, at least, I can only suspect: yours I have had from your own lips. Had my brother been more than the poor weak boy he is, had he been brilliant, powerful, or a millionaire, it would never have been necessary for me to ask you to win him from her. No, madame, for you would have done so of your own accord!" Now, there is such a thing as diplomacy, and there is such a thing as luck, and of the former Louise Chapuis had not an atom. An impulse, made apparently reasonable by pure imagination, led her to seek out Gabrielle, and had she found her, as her fancy had painted her, readily moved by the appeal of honest affection and confidence, she was competent to have won her end. Louise was one of the people who, in foreseeing a dispute, invent the replies to their own questions, and who, if the actual answers accord with those preconceived, will emerge from the ordeal triumphant, but who lack the diplomat's gift of adapting the line of argument to that of unexpected retort. Confronted with a state of affairs wholly different from that which she had supposed existent, her sole resource was in this outburst of disappointment and reproach, honest, but inutile as the clamor of a baffled baby. So much for diplomacy.