"You are speaking of Hermione. Oh, do try and persuade her sister not to go the same way: is not one enough? Must more loveliness be wasted?"
Sitting on a cushion on the floor, she raises her glowing face, her eyes dark as night, her scarlet mouth, her dazzling pallor.
"I shall do nothing of the sort," I answer with a laugh, "for I rather like Hermione's folly; besides, her reason will soon conquer it! The dangers we run depend on chance; the first roads we take depend on influences. The way in which we bear those dangers and return from those roads: that is where the interest begins!"
"But, tell me," murmurs Cecilia, "what does your Hermione want?"
"Here is her story, in a couple of words," says Marcienne. "She is rich, beautiful and talented; and she belongs to an aristocratic English family. At twenty, she yielded to an impulse and went on the stage; in a few months, she was a really successful actress; then she made the acquaintance of a Hindu high-priest. He came and went; and she followed him. During the last two years, she has been his faithful disciple."
"But what does she preach?"
Marcienne made a vague gesture:
"Buddhist doctrines! She believes that she possesses the true faith and tries to hand it on to others. In the few days which she has spent in Paris, she has already made two converts, those two innocents who are hanging on her words. It would all be charming, you know, if her creed did not enjoin chastity and if, by holding those views, she did not risk the awful fate of never knowing love!"
Marcienne continued, still addressing herself to my new friend:
"Do you see those pretty creatures in white, standing close to Hermione? They are two orphans, two girls who fell in love with the same man. I don't know the details of the romance, nor can I say whether it was fancy or passion that guided the man's choice. All I know is that he loved one of them and had a child by her. A little while after, he deserted her. Thereupon their unhappy love reunited those two hearts which happy love, as always, had divided. The same devotion and kindness made them both bend over the one cradle. Oh, the adorable pity that prompted Anne's heart on the day when, hearing her baby call her mamma for the first time, she sent for her sister Marie and, holding towards her those little outstretched arms, those eyes in which consciousness was dawning, that little fluttering life seeking a resting-place, she offered the maid, in the exquisite mystery of that first smile, the first name of love! From that time onward, the baby grew up between its two mammas as one treads a sunny path between two flowering banks."