. Nothing succeeds like success. But I see I am spoiling your
morning. Au revoir, mon enfant."

Left alone, Isaura brooded in a sort of mournful wonderment over the
words referring to herself in Graham's letter. Read though but once,
she knew them by heart. What! did he consider those characters she had
represented as wholly imaginary? In one--the most prominent, the
most attractive--could he detect no likeness to himself? What! did he
consider so "over-romantic and exaggerated" sentiments which couched
appeals from her heart to his? Alas! in matters of sentiment it is the
misfortune of us men that even the most refined of us often grate upon
some sentiment in a woman, though she may not be romantic,--not romantic
at all, as people go,--some sentiment which she thought must be so
obvious if we cared a straw about her, and which, though we prize
her above the Indies, is by our dim, horn-eyed, masculine vision
undiscernible. It may be something in itself the airiest of trifles: the
anniversary of a day in which the first kiss was interchanged, nay, of a
violet gathered, a misunderstanding cleared up; and of that anniversary
we remember no more than we do of our bells and coral. But she--she
remembers it; it is no bells and coral to her. Of course, much is to be
said in excuse of man, brute though he be. Consider the multiplicity
of his occupations, the practical nature of his cares. But granting the
validity of all such excuse, there is in man an original obtuseness of
fibre as regards sentiment in comparison with the delicacy of woman's.
It comes, perhaps, from the same hardness of constitution which forbids
us the luxury of ready tears. Thus it is very difficult for the wisest
man to understand thoroughly a woman. Goethe says somewhere that the
highest genius in man must have much of the woman in it. If this be
true, the highest genius alone in man can comprehend and explain the
nature of woman, because it is not remote from him, but an integral part
of his masculine self. I am not sure, however, that it necessitates the
highest genius, but rather a special idiosyncrasy in genius which the
highest may or may not have. I think Sophocles a higher genius than
Euripides; but Euripides has that idiosyncrasy, and Sophocles not. I
doubt whether women would accept Goethe as their interpreter with the
same readiness with which they would accept Schiller. Shakspeare, no
doubt, excels all poets in the comprehension of women, in his