her that
we really must go and see what is doing in Paris, just as one might talk
of going to Switzerland.

"Only think," Gaston will exclaim, "such and such a boulevard is
being made, the Madeleine is finished. We ought to see it. Let us go
to-morrow."

And to-morrow comes, and we are in no hurry to get up, and we breakfast
in our bedroom. Then midday is on us, and it is too hot; a siesta seems
appropriate. Then Gaston wishes to look at me, and he gazes on my face
as though it were a picture, losing himself in this contemplation,
which, as you may suppose, is not one-sided. Tears rise to the eyes
of both as we think of our love and tremble. I am still the mistress,
pretending, that is, to give less than I receive, and I revel in this
deception. To a woman what can be sweeter than to see passion ever held
in check by tenderness, and the man who is her master stayed, like a
timid suitor, by a word from her, within the limits that she chooses?

You asked me to describe him; but, Renee, it is not possible to make
a portrait of the man we love. How could the heart be kept out of the
work? Besides, to be frank between ourselves, we may admit that one of
the dire effects of civilization on our manners is to make of man in
society a being so utterly different from the natural man of strong
feeling, that sometimes not a single point of likeness can be found
between these two aspects of the same person. The man who falls into the
most graceful operatic poses, as he pours sweet nothings into your ear
by the fire at night, may be entirely destitute of those more intimate
charms which a woman values. On the other hand, an ugly, boorish,
badly-dressed figure may mark a man endowed with the very genius of
love, and who has a perfect mastery over situations which might baffle
us with our superficial graces. A man whose conventional aspect accords
with his real nature, who, in the intimacy of wedded love, possesses
that inborn grace which can be neither given nor acquired, but which
Greek art has embodied in statuary, that careless innocence of the
ancient poets which, even in frank undress, seems to clothe the soul as
with a veil of modesty--this is our ideal, born of our own conceptions,
and linked with the universal harmony which seems to be the reality
underlying all created things. To find this ideal in life is the problem
which haunts the imagination of every woman--in Gaston I have found it.

Ah! dear, I did not know what lo