that your good
sense and your intellect did not, in default of modesty, step in and
show you that by acting as you did you were throwing yourself at a man's
head. To think that my daughter, my only remaining child, should lack
pride and delicacy! Oh, Modeste, you made your father pass two hours in
hell when he heard of it; for, after all, your conduct has been the
same as Bettina's without the excuse of a heart's seduction; you were
a coquette in cold blood, and that sort of coquetry is head-love, the
worst vice of French women."

"I, without pride!" said Modeste, weeping; "but _he_ has not yet seen
me."

"_He_ knows your name."

"I did not tell it to him till my eyes had vindicated the
correspondence, lasting three months, during which our souls had spoken
to each other."

"Oh, my dear misguided angel, you have mixed up a species of reason
with a folly that has compromised your own happiness and that of your
family."

"But, after all, papa, happiness is the absolution of my temerity," she
said, pouting.

"Oh! your conduct is temerity, is it?"

"A temerity that my mother practised before me," she retorted quickly.

"Rebellious child! your mother after seeing me at a ball told her
father, who adored her, that she thought she could be happy with me. Be
honest, Modeste; is there any likeness between a love hastily conceived,
I admit, but under the eyes of a father, and your mad action of writing
to a stranger?"

"A stranger, papa? say rather one of our greatest poets, whose character
and whose life are exposed to the strongest light of day, to detraction,
to calumny,--a man robed in fame, and to whom, my dear father, I was a
mere literary and dramatic personage, one of Shakespeare's women, until
the moment when I wished to know if the man himself were as beautiful as
his soul."

"Good God! my poor child, you are turning marriage into poetry. But if,
from time immemorial, girls have been cloistered in the bosom of their
families, if God, if social laws put them under the stern yoke of
parental sanction, it is, mark my words, to spare them the misfortunes
that this very poetry which charms and dazzles you, and which you are
therefore unable to judge of, would entail upon them. Poetry is indeed
one of the pleasures of life, but it is not life itself."

"Papa, that is a suit still pending before the Court of Facts; the
struggle is forever going on between our hearts and the claims of
family."

"Alas for the