d
in poetry and art-onward through her restless, dreamy, aspiring
youth-onward--onward--till now, through all that constitutes the
glorious reality that we call romance.

Never before had she left for two days unanswered letters which were to
her as Sibylline leaves to some unquiet neophyte yearning for solutions
to enigmas suggested whether by the world without or by the soul within.
For six days Madame de Grantmesnil's letter remained unanswered, unread,
neglected, thrust out of sight; just as when some imperious necessity
compels us to grapple with a world that is, we cast aside the romance
which, in our holiday hours, had beguiled us to a world with which we
have interests and sympathies no more.

CHAPTER XII.

Gustave recovered, but slowly. The physician pronounced him out of all
immediate danger, but said frankly to him, and somewhat more guardedly
to his parents, "There is ample cause to beware." "Look you, my young
friend," he added to Rameau, "mere brain-work seldom kills a man
once accustomed to it like you; but heart-work, and stomach-work, and
nerve-work, added to brain-work, may soon consign to the coffin a frame
ten times more robust than yours. Write as much as you will--that is
your vocation; but it is not your vocation to drink absinthe--to preside
at orgies in the Maison Doree. Regulate yourself, and not after the
fashion of the fabulous Don Juan. Marry--live soberly and quietly--and
you may survive the grandchildren of viveurs. Go on as you have done,
and before the year is out you are in Pere la Chaise."

Rameau listened languidly, but with a profound conviction that the
physician thoroughly understood his case.

Lying helpless on his bed, he had no desire for orgies at the Maison
Doree; with parched lips thirsty for innocent tisane of lime-blossoms,
the thought of absinthe was as odious to him as the liquid fire of
Phlegethon. If ever sinner became suddenly convinced that there was
a good deal to be said in favour of a moral life, that sinner at the
moment I speak of was Gustave Rameau: Certainly a moral life--'Domus
et placens uxor',--was essential to the poet who, aspiring to immortal
glory, was condemned to the ailments of a very perishable frame.

"Ah," he murmured plaintively to himself, "that girl Isaura can have no
true sympathy with genius! It is no ordinary man that she will kill in
me!"

And so murmuring he fell asleep. When he woke and found his head
pillowed on his mother'