"The Englishman began to rub his hands and murmur:
"'A good supper! A good supper!'
"We did sup. I was not gay. I regretted the Marie Joseph.
"We had to separate the next day after much handshaking and many promises to write. They departed for Biarritz. I wanted to follow them.
"I was hard hit; I wanted to ask this little girl to marry me. If we had passed eight days together, I should have done so! How weak and incomprehensible a man sometimes is!
"Two years passed without my hearing a word from them. Then I received a letter from New York. She was married, and wrote to tell me. And since then we write to each other every year, on New Year's Day. She tells me about her life, talks of her children, her sisters, never of her husband! Why? Ah! why? ... And as for me I only talk of the Marie Joseph. That was perhaps the only woman I have ever loved. No—that I ever should have loved.... Ah, well! who can tell? Facts master you.... And then—and then—all passes.... She must be old now; I should not know her.... Ah! she of the by-gone time, she of the wreck! What a creature! ... Divine! ... She writes me her hair is white.... That caused me terrible pain.... Ah! her yellow hair.... No, my English girl exists no longer.... They are sad, such things as that!"
VII
A DESCENT INTO THE MAELSTROM
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"The ways of God in Nature, as in Providence, are not as our ways; nor are the models that we frame any way commensurate to the vastness, profundity, and unsearchableness of His works, which have a depth in them greater than the well of Democritus."—JOSEPH GLANVILLE.