nt to be mutually pleased. They separate; and the
Captain asks if the lady really have 'twenty thousand pounds fortune.'
Match-making aunts and mothers arrange preliminaries; and the young
people have leisure to fail in love after the most approved fashion:
that is, they meet very often, and talk more together, than common
acquaintances are wont to do; but their talk is of Grisi and Lablache,
of the Duke's fete at Chiswick, and Lord Donnington's yacht excursion to
Malta. If the gentleman have a confidence to evoke, it is, possibly, the
state of his mind on the approaching 'Derby.' Now I would ask, How much
of mutual esteem, or even knowledge, grows out of all this?"

"Pretty much the same amount as exists in a French marriage, where M. le
Marquis having '_fait ses farces_,' is fain to marry, being somewhat
too deep in debt to continue what his years admonish him to abandon.
Mademoiselle is brought from the convent, or the governess's apartment,
to sign the contract and accept her husband. There is enough in the
very emancipation she obtains to be pleasurable, not to speak of a grand
_trousseau_, diamonds, cashmeres, and the prettiest equipage in Paris."

"Hence," said I, "we seem agreed, that one must not choose a wife or
husband _a la mode Anglaise ni Francaise_.

"I believe not," said she, laughing; "for if marriages be made in
heaven, they are about the strangest employment for angels I ever heard
of."

"It entirely depends on how you regard what are commonly called
accidents and chances, as to the interpretation you give that saying. If
you see, in those curious coincidences that are ever occurring in life,
nothing more than hazard, you at once abandon all idea of governing
human actions. If, on the other hand, you read them too implicitly, and
accept them as indications for the future, you rush into fatalism.
For my own part, I think less of the events themselves, than as they
originate or evoke sentiments in two parties, who, though previously
known to each, only discover on some sudden emergency a wonderful
agreement in sentiment and feeling. In the ordinary detail of life
they had gone on, each ignorant of the other's opinions: so long as the
wheels of life revolved freely and noiselessly, the journey had called
for nothing of mutual interest; but some chance occurrence, some
accidental rencontre occurs, and they at once perceive a most fortuitous
similarity in taste or thinking. Like people who have suddenly