ng, at all events as you apply it now. I
could not love M. Rameau; I never gave him cause to think I could."

"I wish for both your sakes that you could make me a different answer;
for his sake, because, knowing his faults and failings, I am persuaded
that they would vanish in a companionship so pure, so elevating as
yours: you could make him not only so much happier but so much better a
man. Hush! let me go on, let me come to yourself,--I say for your sake
I wish it. Your pursuits, your ambition, are akin to his; you should
not marry one who could not sympathise with you in these. If you did,
he might either restrict the exercise of your genius or be chafed at its
display. The only authoress I ever knew whose married lot was serenely
happy to the last, was the greatest of English poetesses married to a
great English poet. You cannot, you ought not, to devote yourself to the
splendid career to which your genius irresistibly impels you, without
that counsel, that support, that protection, which a husband alone
can give. My dear child, as the wife myself of a man of letters, and
familiarised to all the gossip, all the scandal, to which they who
give their names to the public are exposed, I declare that if I had a
daughter who inherited Savarin's talents, and was ambitious of attaining
to his renown, I would rather shut her up in a convent than let her
publish a book that was in every one's hands until she had sheltered
her name under that of a husband; and if I say this of my child, with a
father so wise in the world's ways, and so popularly respected as my bon
homme, what must I feel to be essential to your safety, poor stranger
in our land! poor solitary orphan! with no other advice or guardian
than the singing mistress whom you touchingly call 'Madre!' I see how
I distress and pain you--I cannot help it. Listen! The other evening
Savarin came back from his favourite cafe in a state of excitement that
made me think he came to announce a revolution. It was about you; he
stormed, he wept--actually wept--my philosophical laughing Savarin.
He had just heard of that atrocious wager made by a Russian barbarian.
Every one praised you for the contempt with which you had treated the
savage's insolence. But that you should have been submitted to such an
insult without one male friend who had the right to resent and chastise
it,--you cannot think how Savarin was chafed and galled. You know how he
admires, but you cannot guess how h