child that finds her happiness in resisting them," said
the colonel, gravely. "In 1813 I saw one of my comrades, the Marquis
d'Aiglemont, marry his cousin against the wishes of her father, and the
pair have since paid dear for the obstinacy which the young girl took
for love. The family must be sovereign in marriage."

"My poet has told me all that," she answered. "He played Orgon for some
time; and he was brave enough to disparage the personal lives of poets."

"I have read your letters," said Charles Mignon, with the flicker of a
malicious smile on his lips that made Modeste very uneasy, "and I ought
to remark that your last epistle was scarcely permissible in any woman,
even a Julie d'Etanges. Good God! what harm novels do!"

"We should live them, my dear father, whether people wrote them or not;
I think it is better to read them. There are not so many adventures in
these days as there were under Louis XIV. and Louis XV., and so they
publish fewer novels. Besides, if you have read those letters, you must
know that I have chosen the most angelic soul, the most sternly upright
man for your son-in-law, and you must have seen that we love one another
at least as much as you and mamma love each other. Well, I admit that it
was not all exactly conventional; I did, if you _will_ have me say so,
wrong--"

"I have read your letters," said her father, interrupting her, "and I
know exactly how far your lover justified you in your own eyes for a
proceeding which might be permissible in some woman who understood life,
and who was led away by strong passion, but which in a young girl of
twenty was a monstrous piece of wrong-doing."

"Yes, wrong-doing for commonplace people, for the narrow-minded
Gobenheims, who measure life with a square rule. Please let us keep to
the artistic and poetic life, papa. We young girls have only two ways to
act; we must let a man know we love him by mincing and simpering, or we
must go to him frankly. Isn't the last way grand and noble? We French
girls are delivered over by our families like so much merchandise, at
sixty days' sight, sometimes thirty, like Mademoiselle Vilquin; but in
England, and Switzerland, and Germany, they follow very much the plan
I have adopted. Now what have you got to say to that? Am I not half
German?"

"Child!" cried the colonel, looking at her; "the supremacy of France
comes from her sound common-sense, from the logic to which her noble
language constrains her mind.