her personal self.

"You must think me a very ordinary man, if you fear any evil, no
matter what, from me," he said, with ill-concealed bitterness.

"Forgive me, friend," she replied, taking his hand in hers
caressingly, and letting her fingers wander gently over it. "I know
your worth. You have related to me your whole life; it is noble, it is
beautiful, it is sublime, and worthy of your name; perhaps, in return,
I owe you mine. But I fear to lower myself in your eyes by relating
secrets which are not wholly mine. How can you believe--you, a man of
solitude and poesy--the horrors of social life? Ah! you little think
when you invent your dramas that they are far surpassed by those that
are played in families apparently united. You are wholly ignorant of
certain gilded sorrows."

"I know all!" he cried.

"No, you know nothing."

D'Arthez felt like a man lost on the Alps of a dark night, who sees,
at the first gleam of dawn, a precipice at his feet. He looked at the
princess with a bewildered air, and felt a cold chill running down his
back. Diane thought for a moment that her man of genius was a
weakling, but a flash from his eyes reassured her.

"You have become to me almost my judge," she said, with a desperate
air. "I must speak now, in virtue of the right that all calumniated
beings have to show their innocence. I have been, I am still (if a
poor recluse forced by the world to renounce the world is still