modify my opinion of your conduct. You are a poet and a poem, even
more than you are a woman. Yes, there is in you something more
precious than beauty; you are the beautiful Ideal of art, of
fancy. The step you took, blamable as it would be in an ordinary
young girl, allotted to an every-day destiny, has another aspect
if endowed with the nature which I now attribute to you. Among the
crowd of beings flung by fate into the social life of this planet
to make up a generation there are exceptional souls. If your
letter is the outcome of long poetic reveries on the fate which
conventions bring to women, if, constrained by the impulse of a
lofty and intelligent mind, you have wished to understand the life
of a man to whom you attribute the gift of genius, to the end that
you may create a friendship withdrawn from the ordinary relations
of life, with a soul in communion with your own, disregarding thus
the ordinary trammels of your sex,--then, assuredly, you are an
exception. The law which rightly limits the actions of the crowd
is too limited for you. But in that case, the remark in my first
letter returns in greater force,--you have done too much or not
enough.

Accept once more my thanks for the service you have rendered me,
that of compelling me to sound my heart. You have corrected in me
the false idea, only too common in France, that marriage should be
a means of fortune. While I struggled with my conscience a sacred
voice spoke to me. I swore solemnly to make my fortune myself, and
not be led by motives of cupidity in choosing the companion of my
life. I have also reproached myself for the blamable curiosity you
have excited in me. You have not six millions. There is no
concealment possible in Havre for a young lady who possesses such
a fortune; you would be discovered at once by the pack of hounds
of great families whom I see in Paris on the hunt after heiresses,
and who have already sent one, the grand equerry, the young duke,
among the Vilquins. Therefore, believe me, the sentiments I have
now expressed are fixed in my mind as a rule of life, from which I
have abstracted all influences of romance or of actual fact. Prove
to me, therefore, that you have one of those souls which may be
forgiven for its disobedience to the common law, by perceiving and
comprehending the spirit of this letter as you did that of my
first letter. If you are destin