violence of the storm she herself had raised there, the countess
looked with stupefied eyes at the banker's wife; her tears stopped,
and her eyes grew fixed.

"Are you in misery as well, my dearest?" she said, in a low voice.

"My griefs will not ease yours."

"But tell them to me, darling; I am not yet too selfish to listen. Are
we to suffer together once more, as we did in girlhood?"

"But alas! we suffer apart," said the banker's wife. "You and I live
in two worlds at enmity with each other. I go to the Tuileries when
you are not there. Our husbands belong to opposite parties. I am the
wife of an ambitious banker,--a bad man, my darling; while you have a
noble, kind, and generous husband."

"Oh! don't reproach me!" cried the countess. "To understand my
position, a woman must have borne the weariness of a vapid and barren
life, and have entered suddenly into a paradise of light and love; she
must know the happiness of feeling her whole life in that of another;
of espousing, as it were, the infinite emotions of a poet's soul; of
living a double existence,--going, coming with him in his courses
through space, through the world of ambition; suffering with his
griefs, rising on the wings of his high pleasures, developing her
faculties on some vast stage; and all this while living calm, serene,
and cold before an observing world. Ah! dearest, what happiness in
having at all hours an enormous interest, which multiplies the fibres
of the heart and varies them indefinitely! to feel no longer cold
indifference! to find one's very life depending on a thousand trifles!