"A fellow-student, I presume."
"No, Madame--an artist."
"And you are very happy here?"
"I have occupations and amusements; therefore, if to be neither idle nor dull is to be happy. I suppose I am happy."
"Nay," she said quickly, "be sure of it. Do not doubt it. Who asks more from Fate courts his own destruction."
"But it would be difficult, Madame, to go through life without desiring something better, something higher--without ambition, for instance--without love."
"Ambition and love!" she repeated, smiling sadly. "There speaks the man. Ambition first--the aim and end of life; love next--the pleasant adjunct to success! Ah, beware of both."
"But without either, life would be a desert."
"Life is a desert," she replied, bitterly. "Ambition is its mirage, ever beckoning, ever receding--love its Dead Sea fruit, fair without and dust within. You look surprised. You did not expect such gloomy theories from me--yet I am no cynic. I have lived; I have suffered; I am a woman--voilà tout. When you are a few years older, and have trodden some of the flinty ways of life, you will see the world as I see it."
"It may be so, Madame; but if life is indeed a desert, it is, at all events, some satisfaction to know that the dwellers in tents become enamored of their lot, and, content with what the desert has to give, desire no other. It is only the neophyte who rides after the mirage and thirsts for the Dead Sea apple."