"You and I live in two worlds at enmity with each other.

I go to the Tuileries when you are not there.

Our husbands belong to opposite parties.

I am the wife of an ambitious banker,--a bad man, my darling; while you have a noble, kind, and generous husband." "Oh! don't reproach me!" cried the countess.

"To understand my position, a woman must have borne the weariness of a vapid and barren life, and have entered suddenly into a paradise of light and love; she must know the happiness of feeling her whole life in that of another; of espousing, as it were, the infinite emotions of a poet's soul; of living a double existence,--going, coming with him in his courses through space, through the world of ambition; suffering with his griefs, rising on the wings of his high pleasures, developing her faculties on some vast stage; and all this while living calm, serene, and cold before an observing world.