Her independence
sort of kept them vibrating between ecstasies of joy and chills of fear.

The Princess was plain in feature but finely formed, and had attracted
the favorable attention of various worthy young men, but no man had ever
dared to make love to her except by post or proxy. Several lovers had
pressed their claims, making appeal through her father; but the Duke of
Orleans, strong as he was, never had cared to intimate to his daughter a
suggestion as to whom she should wed. Love to her was a high and holy
sacrament, and a marriage of convenience or diplomacy was to the mind of
the Princess immoral and abhorrent.

The father knew her views and respected them.

But happiness is not a matter of intellect. And in spite of her
brilliant, daring mind the Princess of Orleans was fretting her soul out
against the bars of environment: she lacked employment; she longed to do,
to act, to be.

She had ambitions in the line of art, and believed she had talent that
was worth cultivating.

And so it was that Ary Scheffer, the acknowledged man of talent, was
invited to Neuilly.

He came.

He was twenty-nine years of age; the Princess was twenty-five.

The ennui of unused powers and corroding heart-hunger had made the
Princess old before her time. Scheffer's fight with adversity had long
before robbed him of his youth.

These two eyed each other curiously.

The gentle, mild-voiced artist knew his place and did not presume on
terms of equality with the Princess who traced a direct pedigree to Louis
the Great. He thought to wait and allow her gradually to show her
quality.

She tried her caustic wit upon him, and he looked at her out of mild blue
eyes and made no reply. He had no intention of competing with her on her
own preserve; and he had a pride in his profession that equaled her pride
of birth.

He looked at her--just looked at her in silence. And this spoilt child,
before whom all others quailed, turned scarlet, stammered and made
apology.

In good sooth, she had played tierce and thrust with every man she had
met, and had come off without a scar; but here was a man of pride and
poise, and yet far beneath her in a social way, and he had rebuked her
haughty spirit by a simple look.

A London lawyer has recently put in a defense for wife-beating, on the
grounds that there are women who should be chastised for their own good.
I do not go quite this far, but from the time Scheffer rebuked the
Princess of O