of
life; you demand sacrifices for the pleasure of rewarding them; you
submit your Felipe to tests in order to ascertain whether desire, hope,
and curiosity are enduring in their nature. But, child, behind all your
fantastic stage scenery rises the altar, where everlasting bonds are
forged. The very morrow of your marriage the graceful structure raised
by your subtle strategy may fall before that terrible reality which
makes of a girl a woman, of a gallant a husband. Remember that there is
not exemption for lovers. For them, as for ordinary folk like Louis and
me, there lurks beneath the wedding rejoicings the great "Perhaps" of
Rabelais.

I do not blame you, though, of course, it was rash, for talking with
Felipe in the garden, or for spending a night with him, you on your
balcony, he on his wall; but you make a plaything of life, and I am
afraid that life may some day turn the tables. I dare not give you the
counsel which my own experience would suggest; but let me repeat once
more from the seclusion of my valley that the viaticum of married life
lies in these words--resignation and self-sacrifice. For, spite of all
your tests, your coyness, and your vigilance, I can see that marriage
will mean to you what it has been to me. The greater the passion,
the steeper the precipice we have hewn for our fall--that is the only
difference.

Oh! what I would give to see the Baron de Macumer and talk with him for
an hour or two! Your happiness lies so near my heart.

XXVI. LOUISE DE MACUMER TO RENEE DE L'ESTORADE March.

As Felipe has carried out, with a truly Saracenic generosity, the wishes
of my father and mother in acknowledging the fortune he has not received
from me, the Duchess has become even more friendly to me than before.
She calls me little sly-boots, little woman of the world, and says I
know how to use my tongue.

"But, dear mamma," I said to her the evening before the contract was
signed, "you attribute to cunning and smartness on my part what is
really the outcome of the truest, simplest, most unselfish, most devoted
love that ever was! I assure you that I am not at all the 'woman of the
world' you do me the honor of believing me to be."

"Come, come, Armande," she said, putting her arm on my neck and drawing
me to her, in order to kiss my forehead, "you did not want to go back
to the convent, you did not want to die an old maid, and, like a fine,
noble-hearted Chaulieu, as you are, you recognized the