notwithstanding my desire of not making myself conspicuous in anything, I
have been unable to take upon myself to join the throng of admirers whom
Madame de Palme drags after her triumphal car. I know not whether

"Le tyran dans sa cour remarqua mon absence:"

I am sometimes tempted to believe it, from the glances of astonishment and
scorn with which I am overwhelmed when we meet; but it is more simple to
attribute these hostile symptoms to the natural antipathy that separates
two creatures as dissimilar as we are. I look at her at times, myself,
with the gaping surprise which must be excited in the mind of any thinking
being by the monstrosity of such a psychological phenomenon. In that way
we are even. I ought rather to say we were even, for we are really no
longer so, since a rather cruel little adventure that happened to me last
night, and which constitutes in my account-current with Madame de Palme a
considerable advance, which she will find it difficult to make up. I have
told you that Madame de Malouet, through I know not what refinement of
Christian charity, manifested a genuine predilection for the Little
Countess. I was talking with the marquise last evening in a corner of the
drawing-room. I took the liberty of telling her that this predilection,
coming from a woman like her, was a bad example; that I had never very
well understood, for my part, that passage of the Holy Scriptures in which
the return of a single sinner is celebrated above the constant merit of a
thousand just, and that this had always appeared to me very discouraging
for the just.

"In the first place," answered Madame de Malouet, "the just do not get
discouraged; and in the next place, there are none. Do you fancy yourself
one, by chance?"