turn his thoughts to more
agreeable subjects, and the image of Isaura rose before him. To do him
justice he had learned to love this girl as well as his nature would
permit: he loved her with the whole strength of his imagination, and
though his heart was somewhat cold, his imagination was very ardent.
He loved her also with the whole strength of his vanity, and vanity was
even a more preponderant organ of his system than imagination. To carry
off as his prize one who had already achieved celebrity, whose beauty
and fascination of manner were yet more acknowledged than her genius,
would certainly be a glorious triumph.

Every Parisian of Rameau's stamp looks forward in marriage to a
brilliant salon. What salon more brilliant than that which he and Isaura
united could command? He had long conquered his early impulse of envy at
Isaura's success,--in fact that success had become associated with his
own, and had contributed greatly to his enrichment. So that to other
motives of love he might add the prudential one of interest. Rameau well
knew that his own vein of composition, however lauded by the cliques,
and however unrivalled in his own eyes, was not one that brings much
profit in the market. He compared himself to those poets who are too far
in advance of their time to be quite as sure of bread and cheese as they
are of immortal fame.

But he regarded Isaura's genius as of a lower order, and a thing in
itself very marketable. Marry her, and the bread and cheese were so
certain that he might elaborate as slowly as he pleased the verses
destined to immortal fame. Then he should be independent of inferior
creatures like Victor de Mauleon. But while Rameau convinced himself
that he was passionately in love with Isaura, he could not satisfy
himself that she was in love with him.

Though during the past year they had seen each other constantly,
and their literary occupations had produced many sympathies between
them--though he had intimated that many of his most eloquent love-poems
were inspired by her--though he had asserted in prose, very pretty
prose too, that she was all that youthful poets dream of,--yet she had
hitherto treated such declarations with a playful laugh, accepting them
as elegant compliments inspired by Parisian gallantry; and he felt an
angry and sore foreboding that if he were to insist too seriously on
the earnestness of their import and ask her plainly to be his wife,
her refusal would be certain, a