ll be to
arrange so easy and agreeable a life for her, that she shall never
again be tempted to leave me. I have laid in a stock of tenderness and
patience during her week's absence. There is only one point on which
I remain inflexible: I will not again receive that horrible _Tata
Bobosse_, that blue stocking of 1820, who gave me her niece only in the
hopes that my modest fame would serve to heighten hers. Remember, my
dear Marestang, that ever since my marriage this wicked little old woman
has always come between my wife and me, pushing her hump into all our
amusements at the theatres, the exhibitions, in society, in the country,
everywhere in fact. And you wonder after that, at my having displayed
a certain haste in getting rid of her, and packing her off to her good
town of Moulins. Indeed, my dear fellow, you have no idea of all the
harm those old maids, suspicious and ignorant of life, are capable of
doing in a young household. This one had stuffed my wife's pretty
little head full of false, old fashioned, preposterous ideas, trumpery
sentimentality of the time of Ipsiboe or young Florange: "Ah! if my
lady love saw me!" For her, I was a poate, the poate one sees on the
frontispieces of Renduel or Ladvocat, crowned with laurels, a lyre
on his hips, and his short velvet-collared cloak blown aside by a
Parnassian gust of wind. That was the husband she had promised her
niece, and you may fancy how terribly my poor Nina must have been
disappointed. Nevertheless I admit that I was very bungling with the
dear child. As you say, I wanted to go ahead too rapidly, I frightened
her. It was my part gently to modify all that the rather narrowing and
false education of the convent and the sentimental dreams of the Aunt
had effected, leaving the provincial perfume time to evaporate. However
all this can be repaired since she is returning. She is returning, my
dear friend! This evening, I shall go and meet her at the station and we
shall walk home arm in arm, reconciled and happy.

Henri de B.

_Nina de B. to her Aunt in Moulins_.

He was waiting for me at the station and greeted me with a smile and
open arms, as though I were returning from some ordinary journey. You
can imagine that I put on my iciest appearance. Directly I reached home,
I shut myself up in my room, where I dined alone, pleading fatigue.
After which, I locked myself in. He came to bid me good-night through
the key-hole, and to my great surprise, went away o