was accomplished before bedtime, and as he was not in the least sleepy
he devoted the interval to writing two letters, one of them a short note
to Madame de Mauves, which he entrusted to a servant for delivery the
next morning. He had found it best, he said, to leave Saint-Germain
immediately, but he expected to return to Paris early in the autumn. The
other letter was the result of his having remembered a day or two before
that he had not yet complied with Mrs. Draper's injunction to give her
an account of his impression of her friend. The present occasion seemed
propitious, and he wrote half a dozen pages. His tone, however, was
grave, and Mrs. Draper, on reading him over, was slightly disappointed--
she would have preferred he should have "raved" a little more. But what
chiefly concerns us is the concluding passage.

"The only time she ever spoke to me of her marriage," he wrote, "she
intimated that it had been a perfect love-match. With all abatements, I
suppose, this is what most marriages take themselves to be; but it would
mean in her case, I think, more than in that of most women, for her love
was an absolute idealisation. She believed her husband to be a hero of
rose-coloured romance, and he turns out to be not even a hero of very
sad-coloured reality. For some time now she has been sounding her
mistake, but I don't believe she has yet touched the bottom. She strikes
me as a person who's begging off from full knowledge--who has patched up
a peace with some painful truth and is trying a while the experiment of
living with closed eyes. In the dark she tries to see again the gilding
on her idol. Illusion of course is illusion, and one must always pay for
it; but there's something truly tragical in seeing an earthly penalty
levied on such divine folly as this. As for M. de Mauves he's a shallow
Frenchman to his fingers' ends, and I confess I should dislike him for
this if he were a much better man. He can't forgive his wife for having
married him too extravagantly and loved him too well; since he feels, I