it rises. What
happy chance has given me such a destiny? My mother had roused a host of
fears in me; her forecast, which, though free from the alloy of vulgar
pettiness, seemed to me redolent of jealousy, has been falsified by the
event. Your fears and hers, my own--all have vanished in thin air!

We remained at Chantepleurs seven months and a half, for all the world
like a couple of runaway lovers fleeing the parental warmth, while the
roses of pleasure crowned our love and embellished our dual solitude.
One morning, when I was even happier than usual, I began to muse over my
lot, and suddenly Renee and her prosaic marriage flashed into my mind.
It seemed to me that now I could grasp the inner meaning in your life.
Oh! my sweet, why do we speak a different tongue? Your marriage of
convenience and my love match are two worlds, as widely separated as
the finite from infinity. You still walk the earth, whilst I range the
heavens! Your sphere is human, mine divine! Love crowned me queen, you
reign by reason and duty. So lofty are the regions where I soar, that a
fall would shiver me to atoms.

But no more of this. I shrink from painting to you the rainbow
brightness, the profusion, the exuberant joy of love's springtime, as we
know it.

For ten days we have been in Paris, staying in a charming house in the
Rue du Bac, prepared for us by the architect to whom Felipe intrusted
the decoration of Chantepleurs. I have been listening, in all the full
content of an assured and sanctioned love, to that divine music of
Rossini's, which used to soothe me when, as a restless girl, I hungered
vaguely after experience. They say I am more beautiful, and I have a
childish pleasure in hearing myself called "Madame."

Friday morning.

Renee, my fair saint, the happiness of my own life pulls me for ever
back to you. I feel that I can be more to you than ever before, you are
so dear to me! I have studied your wedded life closely in the light of
my own opening chapters; and you seem to me to come out of the scrutiny
so great, so noble, so splendid in your goodness, that I here declare
myself your inferior and humble admirer, as well as your friend. When
I think what marriage has been to me, it seems to me that I should have
died, had it turned out otherwise. And you live! Tell me what your heart
feeds on! Never again shall I make fun of you. Mockery, my sweet, is the
child of ignorance; we jest at what we know nothing of. "Recruits will