CHAPTER III.
"Still follow SENSE, of every art the Soul." POPE: _Moral Essays_--Essay iv.
ERNEST MALTRAVERS spent much of his time with the family of De Montaigne.

There is no period of life in which we are more accessible to the sentiment of friendship than in the intervals of moral exhaustion which succeed to the disappointments of the passions.

There is, then, something inviting in those gentler feelings which keep alive, but do not fever, the circulation of the affections.

Maltravers looked with the benevolence of a brother upon the brilliant, versatile, and restless Teresa.

She was the last person in the world he could have been in love with--for his nature, ardent, excitable, yet fastidious, required something of repose in the manners and temperament of the woman whom he could love, and Teresa scarcely knew what repose was.