Abencerrage which he offers, prostrate before a Catholic Eve! Shall I accept this last descendant of the Moors? Read again and again his Hispano-Saracenic letter, Renee dear, and you will see how love makes a clean sweep of all the Judaic bargains of your philosophy. Renee, your letter lies heavy on my heart; you have vulgarized life for me. What need have I for finessing? Am I not mistress for all time of this lion whose roar dies out in plaintive and adoring sighs? Ah! how he must have raged in his lair of the Rue Hillerin-Bertin! I know where he lives, I have his card: _F., Baron de Macumer_. He has made it impossible for me to reply. All I can do is to fling two camellias in his face. What fiendish arts does love possess--pure, honest, simple-minded love! Here is the most tremendous crisis of a woman's heart resolved into an easy, simple action. Oh, Asia! I have read the _Arabian Nights_, here is their very essence: two flowers, and the question is settled. We clear the fourteen volumes of _Clarissa Harlowe_ with a bouquet. I writhe before this letter, like a thread in the fire. To take, or not to take, my two camellias. Yes or No, kill or give life! At last a voice cries to me, "Test him!" And I will test him. XVI THE SAME TO THE SAME March. I am dressed in white--white camellias in my hair, and another in my hand. My mother has red camellias; so it would not be impossible to take one from her--if I wished! I have a strange longing to put off the decision to the last moment, and make him pay for his red camellia by a little suspense. What a vision of beauty! Griffith begged me to stop for a little and be admired. The solemn crisis of the evening and the drama of my secret reply have given me a color; on each cheek I sport a red camellia laid upon a white! 1 A. M. Everybody admired me, but only one adored. He hung his head as I entered with a white camellia, but turned pale as the flower when, later, I took a red one from my mother's hand. To arrive with the two flowers might possibly have been accidental; but this deliberate action was a reply. My confession, therefore, is fuller than it need have been. The opera was _Romeo and Juliet_. As you don't know the duet of the two lovers, you can't understand the bliss of two neophytes in love,