one creature whom she liked to have about her; the chateau must be
perfectly quiet, the child must play at the other end of the house.
The slightest sound had grown so intolerable, that any human voice,
even the voice of her own child, jarred upon her.

At first the whole countryside was deeply interested in these
eccentricities; but time passed on, every possible hypothesis had been
advanced to account for them and the peasants and dwellers in the
little country towns thought no more of the invalid lady.

So the Marquise was left to herself. She might live on, perfectly
silent, amid the silence which she herself had created; there was
nothing to draw her forth from the tapestried chamber where her
grandmother died, whither she herself had come that she might die,
gently, without witnesses, without importunate solicitude, without
suffering from the insincere demonstrations of egoism masquerading as
affection, which double the agony of death in great cities.

She was twenty-six years old. At that age, with plenty of romantic
illusions still left, the mind loves to dwell on the thought of death
when death seems to come as a friend. But with youth, death is coy,
coming up close only to go away, showing himself and hiding again,
till youth has time to fall out of love with him during this
dalliance. There is that uncertainty too that hangs over death's
to-morrow. Youth plunges back into the world of living men, there to
find the pain more pitiless than death, that does not wait to strike.

This woman who refused to live was to know the bitterness of these
reprieves in the depths of her loneliness; in moral agony, which death
would not come to end, she was to serve a terrible apprenticeship to