A NEW YEAR'S GIFT
acques de Randal, having dined at home alone, told his valet he might go, and then he sat down at a table to write his letters.
He thus finished every year by writing and dreaming. He made for himself a sort of review of things that had happened since last New Year's Day, things that were now all over and dead; and, in proportion as the faces of his friends rose up before his eyes, he wrote them a few lines, a cordial "Good morning" on the 1st of January.
So he sat down, opened a drawer, took out of it a woman's photograph, gazed at it a few moments, and kissed it. Then, having laid it beside a sheet of note-paper, he began:
"My dear Irene.—You must have by this time the little souvenir which I sent you. I have shut myself up this evening in order to tell you."
The pen here ceased to move. Jacques rose up and began walking up and down the room.
For the last six months he had a mistress, not a mistress like the others, a woman with whom one engages in a passing intrigue, of the theatrical world or the "demi-monde, but a woman whom he loved and won. He was no longer a young man, although he was still comparatively young for a man, and he looked on life seriously in a positive and practical spirit.
Accordingly, he drew up the balance sheet of his passion, as he drew up every year the balance sheet of friendships that were ended or freshly contracted, of circumstances and persons that had entered into his life.