lves in a box which rolls along; the little
people gaily tramp the roads, sitting down in the woods, banqueting at
the inns, as long as their joy, or rather their money lasts. A moralist
is puzzled to decide on which side is the finer sense of modesty,--that
which hides from the public eye and inaugurates the domestic hearth and
bed in private, as to the worthy burghers of all lands, or that which
withdraws from the family and exhibits itself publicly on the high-roads
and in face of strangers. One would think that delicate souls might
desire solitude and seek to escape both the world and their family. The
love which begins a marriage is a pearl, a diamond, a jewel cut by the
choicest of arts, a treasure to bury in the depths of the soul.

Who can relate a honeymoon, unless it be the bride? How many women
reading this history will admit to themselves that this period of
uncertain duration is the forecast of conjugal life? The first three
letters of Sabine to her mother will depict a situation not surprising
to some young brides and to many old women. All those who find
themselves the sick-nurses, so to speak, of a husband's heart, do not,
as Sabine did, discover this at once. But young girls of the faubourg
Saint-Germain, if intelligent, are women in mind. Before marriage, they
have received from their mothers and the world they live in the baptism
of good manners; though women of rank, anxious to hand down their
traditions, do not always see the bearing of their own lessons when they
say to their daughters: "That is a motion that must not be made;" "Never
laugh at such things;" "No lady ever flings herself on a sofa; she sits
down quietly;" "Pray give up such detestable ways;" "My dear, that is a
thing which is never done," etc.

Many bourgeois critics unjustly deny the innocence and virtue of young
girls who, like Sabine, are truly virgin at heart, improved by the
training of their minds, by the habit of noble bearing, by natural good
taste, while, from the age of sixteen, they have learned how to use
their opera-glasses. Sabine was a girl of this school, which was also
that of Mademoiselle de Chaulieu. This inborn sense of the fitness of
things, these gifts of race made Sabine de Grandlieu as interesting a
young woman as the heroine of the "Memoirs of two young Married Women."
Her letters to her mother during the honeymoon, of which we here give
three or four, will show the qualities of her mind and temperament.

G