She has the eyebrows of her Uncle Des Rameures, which gives an air of severity to the face and neutralizes the good-natured expression-a reflex from the softness of her heart.

“She has the dark complexion of her mother, which is more becoming to her mother than to her.  Add to all this, blue-black hair in great silky masses.  On the whole, one knows not what to pronounce her.

   “There, my mother, is my portrait!  Intended to reassure me, it has
   hardly done so; for it seems to me to be that of an ugly little
   woman!

“I wish to be the most lively of women; I wish to be one of the most distinguished.  I wish to be one of the most captivating!  But, oh, my mother! if I please him I am still more enchanted!  On the whole, thank God! he finds me perhaps much better than I am:  for men have not the same taste in these matters that we have.

“But what I really can not comprehend, is why he has so little admiration for the Marquise de Campvallon.  His manner is very cold to her.  Were I a man, I should be wildly in love with that superb woman!  Good-night, most beloved of mothers!”

..........................

“January.

“You complain of me, my cherished one!  The tone of my letters wounds you!  You can not comprehend how this matter of my personal appearance haunts me.  I scrutinize it; I compare it with that of others.  There is something of levity in that which hurts you?  You ask how can I think a man attaches himself to these things, while the merits of mind and soul go for nothing?

“But, my dearest mother, how will these merits of mind and of soul —­supposing your daughter to possess them—­serve her, unless she possesses the courage or has the opportunity to display them?  And when I summon up the courage, it seems to me the occasion never comes.

   “For I must confess to you that this delicious Paris is not perfect;
   and I discover, little by little, the spots upon the sun.

“Paris is the most charming place!  The only pity is that it has inhabitants!  Not but that they are agreeable, for they are only too much so; only they are also very careless, and appear to my view to live and die without reflecting much on what they are doing.  It is not their fault; they have no time.

“Without leaving Paris, they are incessant travellers, eternally distracted by motion and novelty.  Other travellers, when they have visited some distant corner—­forgetting for a while their families, their duties, and their homes—­return and settle down again.  But these Parisians never do.  Their life is an endless voyage; they have no home.  That which elsewhere is the great aim of life is secondary here.  One has here, as elsewhere, an establishment—­a house, a private chamber.  One must have.  Here one is wife or mother, husband or father,