hoped.

I have done my utmost to make her come. Lately, I have been sending her
urgent and encouraging letters daily. Now, the hour is approaching; and
my only feeling is one of anguish.

I have told her twenty times that the talk about responsibility which I
hear all around me brings a smile to my lips. I have told her how, by
making my conduct depend on hers, I relieved myself of all personal
anxiety. And to-day my task appears to me so heavy that I can only laugh
at my presumption.

2

It was foolish of me to write to her:

"What are your faults? Teach me to know you. Tell me what you are."

In reality, our faults arise from our circumstances. Events alone set us
the questions to which our actions give a definite answer. Up to the
present, Rose has not lived; she has been accumulating forces that are
now about to come into being. What will they be? Whither will they tend?
We can assume nothing in a life that is but beginning; and is it not
just this that encourages us to seek and to help? Each of us has only to
look back in order to know that, in the shifting soil of characters, we
can fix or establish nothing. I found her acquiescing in a shameful
servitude; and yet I have faith in the nobility of her soul. She was
untruthful; there was no relation between her wishes and her actions,
her thoughts and her words. Nevertheless, I do not doubt her essential
honesty.

The atmosphere that surrounds us is so often treacherous to our pliant
natures! We women are obliged to lie. So long as we have not found our
"love," we look in vain for a little confidence. No one believes us, no
one receives the best part of our soul. One would think that, for those
who listen to us, our sincerest words are poisoned as they pass through
our fairest smiles. And, when nature has made us beautiful and gifted,
people take pleasure in judging us severely, as they might look at the
summer days through dark-tinted window-panes.

We are always refused recognition. The first feeling which any work that
we perform arouses is one of doubt. Its merit is disputed. And yet we
have devoted a part of our youth to it; we have left with it a little of
our freshness and our bloom. Very often, it is the ransom of our sorrow.
Our love is written upon it; and it bears the imprint alike of our
smiles and of our tears. Do we not know that woman, for all her culture,
remains closer than man to her instinct and her "soil?" She is less
purely intellectu