what I am; you have
often been stern, you have made me very unhappy----"

"I?" said the old maid. "Are you going to pour out all your nonsense
once more about poetry and the arts, and to crack your fingers and
stretch your arms while you spout about the ideal, and beauty, and all
your northern madness?--Beauty is not to compare with solid pudding
--and what am I!--You have ideas in your brain? What is the use of
them? I too have ideas. What is the good of all the fine things you may
have in your soul if you can make no use of them? Those who have ideas
do not get so far as those who have none, if they don't know which way
to go.

"Instead of thinking over your ideas you must work.--Now, what have
you done while I was out?"

"What did your pretty cousin say?"

"Who told you she was pretty?" asked Lisbeth sharply, in a tone hollow
with tiger-like jealousy.

"Why, you did."

"That was only to see your face. Do you want to go trotting after
petticoats? You who are so fond of women, well, make them in bronze.
Let us see a cast of your desires, for you will have to do without the
ladies for some little time yet, and certainly without my cousin, my
good fellow. She is not game for your bag; that young lady wants a man
with sixty thousand francs a year--and has found him!

"Why, your bed is not made!" she exclaimed, looking into the adjoining
room. "Poor dear boy, I quite forgot you!"

The sturdy woman pulled off her gloves, her cape and bonnet, and
remade the artist's little camp bed as briskly as any housemaid. This
mixture of abruptness, of roughness even, with real kindness, perhaps
accounts for the ascendency Lisbeth had acquired over the man whom she
regarded as her personal property. Is not our attachment to life based
on its alternations of good and evil?

If the Livonian had happened to meet Madame Marneffe instead of
Lisbeth Fischer, he would have found a protectress whose complaisance
must have led him into some boggy or discreditable path, where he
would have been lost. He would certainly never have worked, nor the
artist have been hatched out. Thus, while he deplored the old maid's
grasping avarice, his reason bid him prefer her iron hand to the life
of idleness and peril led by many of his fellow-countrymen.

This was the incident that had given rise to the coalition of female
energy and masculine feebleness--a contrast in union said not to be
uncommon in Poland.

In 1833 Mademoiselle Fischer, w