ble
coquetry, that of the soul, which may claim to be love's politeness.
Charles Mignon, when scolding his daughter, failed to distinguish
between the mere desire of pleasing and the love of the mind,--the
thirst for love, and the thirst for admiration. Like every true colonel
of the Empire he saw in this correspondence, rapidly read, only the
young girl who had thrown herself at the head of a poet; but in the
letters which we were forced to lack of space to suppress, a better
judge would have admired the dignified and gracious reserve which
Modeste had substituted for the rather aggressive and light-minded tone
of her first letters. The father, however, was only too cruelly right on
one point. Modeste's last letter, which we have read, had indeed spoken
as though the marriage were a settled fact, and the remembrance of that
letter filled her with shame; she thought her father very harsh and
cruel to force her to receive a man unworthy of her, yet to whom
her soul had flown, as it were, bare. She questioned Dumay about his
interview with the poet, she inveigled him into relating its every
detail, and she did not think Canalis as barbarous as the lieutenant had
declared him. The thought of the beautiful casket which held the letters
of the thousand and one women of this literary Don Juan made her smile,
and she was strongly tempted to say to her father: "I am not the only
one to write to him; the elite of my sex send their leaves for the
laurel wreath of the poet."

During this week Modeste's character underwent a transformation. The
catastrophe--and it was a great one to her poetic nature--roused a
faculty of discernment and also the malice latent in her girlish heart,
in which her suitors were about to encounter a formidable adversary. It
is a fact that when a young woman's heart is chilled her head becomes
clear; she observes with great rapidity of judgment, and with a tinge of
pleasantry which Shakespeare's Beatrice so admirably represents in "Much
Ado about Nothing." Modeste was seized with a deep disgust for men, now
that the most distinguished among them had betrayed her hopes. When a
woman loves, what she takes for disgust is simply the ability to see
clearly; but in matters of sentiment she is never, especially if she is
a young girl, in a condition to see clearly. If she cannot admire, she
despises. And so, after passing through terrible struggles of the soul,
Modeste necessarily put on the armor on which, as s