n abeyance. If Fate has been kind she has been
disillusioned, and if Destiny has used her for a doormat, no matter.

The silly woman is one who has always had her own way, and is intent on
conquest as Chronos appropriates her charms and gives bulk for beauty.

The drudge is only a drudge, and her compensation lies in the fact that
she seldom knows it.

Madame De Berney had been disillusioned, and intellectual desire was
glowing with a steady, mellow light. She wanted to know and to be. And
shooting through space comes Balzac, a vagrant comet, and their orbits
being the same, their masses unite and continue in one course, bowled by
the Infinite.

The leading impulse in the life of Balzac was to express: to tell the
things he knew and the things he imagined. To express was the one
gratification which made life worth living. And so he told Madame De
Berney's son, and then Madame came into the class and he told her. We
talk to the sympathetic and receptive: to those who are masters of the
fine art of listening.

Soon the lessons were too advanced for the son to follow, and so Balzac
told it all to Madame. She listened, smiled indulgently, sighed. They
walked in the park and along country lanes and byways; the young tutor
talked and talked, and laughed and laughed.

Balzac's brain was teeming with ideas, a mass and jumble of thoughts,
ideas, plans and emotions. "Write it out," said Madame--in partial
self-defense, no doubt. "Write it out!"

And so Balzac began to write poetry, plays, essays, stories. And
everything he wrote he read to her. As soon as he had written something
he hastened to hunt up "La Dilecta," as he called her.

Their minds fused in an idea--they blended in thought. He loved her, not
knowing when he began or how. His tumultuous nature poured itself out to
her, all without reason.

She became a need to him. He wrote her letters in the morning and at
night. They dined together, walked, talked, rowed and read.

She ransacked libraries for him. She sold his product to publishers.
They collaborated in writing, but he had the physical strength that she
had not, so he usually fished the story out of the ink-bottle and
presented it to her.

He began to be sought after. Fame appeared on the horizon. Critics rose
and thundered. Balzac defied all rules, walked over the grammar, defiled
the well of classic French. He invented phrases, paraphrased greatness,
coined words. He worked the slide, glide, the ell