st in the reeds--your face
and mine in the water--the blue heaven below us in the stream--O joy,
quick! those hands, those lips! But listen, listen! it is the cruel wind
rising, rising: it chills me to the bone, it chokes, it stifles me! I
cannot see the river, and the cottage is gone, and the sun. O Achille, it
is dark, so dark! Gather me close, beloved!--closer, closer! O death is
kind--tender, like your touch! I have no fears--none!"_

'She sank back into her chair. Anything more pathetic, more noble than
her intonation of those words, could not have been imagined. Desforets
herself could not have spoken them with a more simple, a more piercing
tenderness. I was so confused by a multitude of conflicting feelings--my
own impressions and yours, the realities of the present position and the
possibilities of her future--that I forgot to applaud her. It was the
first time I had had any glimpse at all of her dramatic power, and, rough
and imperfect as the test was, it seemed to me enough. I have not been so
devoted to the _Francais_, and to some of the people connected with
it, for ten years, for nothing! One gets a kind of insight from long
habit which, I think, one may trust. Oh, you blind Eustace, how could you
forget that for a creature so full of primitive energy, so rich in the
_stuff_ of life, nothing is irreparable! Education has passed her by.
Well, she will go to find her education. She will make a teacher out of
every friend, out of every sensation. Incident and feeling, praise and
dispraise, will all alike tend to mould the sensitive plastic material
into shape. So far she may have remained outside her art; the art, no
doubt, has been a conventional appendage, and little more. Training would
have given her good conventions, whereas she has only picked up bad and
imperfect ones. But no training could have given her what she will
evidently soon develop for herself, that force and flame of imagination
which fuses together instrument and idea in one great artistic whole. She
has that imagination. You can see it in her responsive ways, her quick
sensitive emotion. Only let it be roused and guided to a certain height,
and it will overleap the barriers which have hemmed it in, and pour
itself into the channels made ready for it by her art.

'There, at least, you have my strong impression. It is, in many ways, at
variance with some of my most cherished principles; for both you and I
are perhaps inclined to overrate the