soul, we should be more careful and more sensible.

"At last my breast caught fire, and I wished to circle her with my arm; but she said, 'Take care!' So I knelt, and startled her with my love, and poured out upon her knees all the burning passion within me. Astonishment showed on her face, and she gave me a sidelong glance, as though saying to herself: 'So this is how he plays with you—you shall see...'

"In love, sir, we are always simpletons. No doubt I could have possessed her—I realized my folly afterward—but what I was seeking

was not a body: it was love, the ideal...

"I did not part from her until Paris. From the moment of our return she was deep in melancholy, and when I asked her the reason she answered: 'I am

thinking of days like these, which do not come often in a life.' At that my heart beat so violently it nearly leapt from my breast.

"The little minx stirred my passion; at last I lost my head, and before three months had passed I had married her. ...What would you have? When a man is a clerk, alone, with no family and no one to counsel him, he says to himself: how happy life would be with a certain woman!

"But then she torments him morning and evening; she under-stands nothing, she knows nothing; she gives herself over to quarreling

and to singing (ah, the singing, sir!); she pours out to the house-maid all the secrets of the house, and confides to the neighbors' maid all the secrets of the bed; she runs her husband down in the shops; she stuffs her head with absurdities, superstitions, and inanities—until I could weep with despair whenever I talked with her."

Then he fell silent, overcome with weariness and emotion. I looked at him, pitying his simplic-ity, and was about to answer him with some phrase or other—but just then the boat stopped: we had arrived...

The little woman rose, and passed close by me, glancing at me, with an inviting smile on her lips—one of those smiles that drive you out of your senses... Then she sprang ashore.

I sprang up to follow her, but my companion caught me by the sleeve. I shook free of him with a quick movement, but he seized the tail of my coat, laughing and repeating: "We shall not go! We shall not go!"—in a voice so loud that everyone turned toward us.

Laughter rose all around us. I stood rooted, furious; but I lost all courage in the face of mockery and scandal, while my persecutor whis-pered in my ear, rubbing his hands:

"By God, I have done you a good turn there..."