of our own follies! We may fancy his easy pages written in the Chaussee
d'Antin, or Mayfair; but there was one thing that will ever keep the
ancient world dissimilar from the modern."

"And what is that?"

"The ancients knew not that delicacy in the affections which
characterises the descendants of the Goths," said Maltravers, and his
voice slightly trembled; "they gave up to the monopoly of the senses
what ought to have had an equal share in the reason and the imagination.
Their love was a beautiful and wanton butterfly; but not the butterfly
which is the emblem of the soul."

Valerie sighed. She looked timidly into the face of the young
philosopher, but his eyes were averted.

"Perhaps," she said, after a short pause, "we pass our lives more
happily without love than with it. And in our modern social system"
(she continued, thoughtfully, and with profound truth, though it is
scarcely the conclusion to which a woman often arrives) "I think we have
pampered Love to too great a preponderance over the other excitements of
life. As children, we are taught to dream of it; in youth, our books,
our conversation, our plays, are filled with it. We are trained to
consider it the essential of life; and yet, the moment we come to actual
experience, the moment we indulge this inculcated and stimulated
craving, nine times out of ten we find ourselves wretched and undone.
Ah, believe me, Mr. Maltravers, this is not a world in which we should
preach up too far the philosophy of Love!"

"And does Madame de Ventadour speak from experience?" asked Maltravers,