the wildest ambition, as it reaches from the cradle to the grave, from
the laborer's hovel to the royal palace, from palace to the papal chair?
What career in all the world presents such splendid openings? what
unutterable scorn ought I not feel for the bright butterfly life of early
days, when we made so many envy us? Don't you remember, Herminia?" he
added, with a bitter smile.

"You are right, perfectly right, Frederick!" replied the princess
quickly. "How little soever we may reflect, with what contempt do we not
think upon the past! I, like you, often compare it with the present; and
then what satisfaction I feel at having followed your counsels! For,
indeed, without you, I should have played the miserable and ridiculous
part which a woman always plays in her decline from having been beautiful
and surrounded by admirers. What could I have done at this hour? I should
have vainly striven to retain around me a selfish and ungrateful world of
gross and shameful men, who court women only that they may turn them to
the service of their passions, or to the gratification of their vanity.
It is true that there would have remained to me the resource of what is
called keeping an agreeable house for all others,--yes, in order to
entertain them, be visited by a crowd of the indifferent, to afford
opportunities of meeting to amorous young couples, who, following each
other from parlor to parlor, come not to your house but for the purpose
of being together; a very pretty pleasure, truly, that of harboring those
blooming, laughing, amorous youths, who look upon the luxury and
brilliancy with which one surrounds them, as if they were their due upon
bonds to minister to their pleasure, and to their impudent amours!"

Her words were so stinging, and such hateful envy sat upon her face, that
she betrayed the intense bitterness of her regrets in spite of herself.