y folded her in his arms. "Julie!" he
said--"what good would that do? There are some difficulties that are
insurmountable. I can only feel sure you have not vanished from the
world when I hold you to my heart, press my lips to yours, feel my hand
in yours--"

"Be still!" she said, smiling, and gently disengaging herself from him.
"I didn't send Frances away for you to forget all that you have so
solemnly promised me. Let us be sensible, my dear friend--indeed we
must be. Sit down over there, and try, for once, to listen to me,
instead of looking at me. Do you know, I consider it positively
discourteous of you to pay no attention to my wisest words, merely
because, after such a long acquaintance, your eyes still find something
about me to 'study?'"

"O Julie!" he said, and a sad smile passed over his face. "If words
could only help--if the sense and understanding and all the strength of
soul of a noble woman could but avail against the treachery and
unreasonableness of gods and men! But speak, and I will close my eyes
and listen."

"Do you know, you and your young friend are sick of one and the same
illness?" she now said, for he had covered his eyes with his hand and
taken a seat on the sofa, while she stood leaning upon the window-sill.

"I and Felix? I don't understand you."

"You have both come into the world too late, you are both wandering
anachronisms, as he says of himself alone in his letter. His energy and
your artistic nature to-day no longer find the soil and air that are
good for them, and that they deserve. When I look about me, dearest, I
say to myself: 'Where are now the people, the prince, the century to
appreciate this power, to lay commissions, reward, honor, and
admiration at the feet of this creative spirit? to post sonnets on the
door of his workshop, to make a passage for him when he strides among
the multitude, as we read that the ancients did, and the great men,
under the rule of the famous popes and the pomp-loving princes?'--Oh!
my dearest friend, I could weep tears of blood when I think how,
instead of all this, you live here, appreciated only by a circle of
good friends and enthusiastic disciples, and are made the butt of
stupid malice or blind ignorance in all the newspapers! And then, when
a demand arises for the production of some work to adorn a square or a
building, wretched quacks, who are not worthy to unloose the latchet of
your shoes, come running up by all sorts of back-stairs