day, common as the usher of a school, a manufacturer, or some brave soldier without two ideas,—­he would have had a resigned and attentive servant in me.  But what an awful suicide! never could my soul have expanded in the life-giving rays of a beloved sun.  No murmur should have revealed to my father, or my mother, or my children the suicide of the creature who at this instant is shaking her fetters, casting lightnings from her eyes, and flying towards you with eager wing.  See, she is there, at the angle of your desk, like Polyhymnia, breathing the air of your presence, and glancing about her with a curious eye.  Sometimes in the fields where my husband would have taken me to walk, I should have wept, apart and secretly, at sight of a glorious morning; and in my heart, or hidden in a bureau-drawer, I might have kept some treasure, the comfort of poor girls ill-used by love, sad, poetic souls,—­but ah!  I have you, I believe in you, my friend.  That belief straightens all my thoughts and fancies, even the most fantastic, and sometimes—­see how far my frankness leads me—­I wish I were in the middle of the book we are just beginning; such persistency do I feel in my sentiments, such strength in my heart to love, such constancy sustained by reason, such heroism for the duties for which I was created,—­if indeed love can ever be transmuted into duty.

If you were able to follow me to the exquisite retreat where I fancy ourselves happy, if you knew my plans and projects, the dreadful word “folly!” might escape you, and I should be cruelly punished for sending poetry to a poet.  Yes, I wish to be a spring of waters inexhaustible as a fertile land for the twenty years that nature allows me to shine.  I want to drive away satiety by charm.  I mean to be courageous for my friend as most women are for the world.  I wish to vary happiness.  I wish to put intelligence into tenderness, and to give piquancy to fidelity.  I am filled with ambition to kill the rivals of the past, to conjure away all outside griefs by a wife’s gentleness, by her proud abnegation, to take a lifelong care of the nest,—­such as birds can only take for a few weeks.

Tell me, do you now think me to blame for my first letter?  The mysterious wind of will drove me to you, as the tempest brings the little rose-tree to the pollard window.  In your letter, which I hold here upon my heart, you cried out, like your ancestor when he departed for the Crusades, “God wills it.”

Ah! but you will cry out, “What a chatterbox!” All the people
round me say, on the contrary, “Mademoiselle is very taciturn.”

O. d’Este M.

CHAPTER XI

What comes of correspondence