y by
charm. I mean to be courageous for my friend as most women are for
the world. I wish to vary happiness. I wish to put intelligence
into tenderness, and to give piquancy to fidelity. I am filled
with ambition to kill the rivals of the past, to conjure away all
outside griefs by a wife's gentleness, by her proud abnegation, to
take a lifelong care of the nest,--such as birds can only take for
a few weeks.

Tell me, do you now think me to blame for my first letter? The
mysterious wind of will drove me to you, as the tempest brings the
little rose-tree to the pollard window. In your letter, which I
hold here upon my heart, you cried out, like your ancestor when he
departed for the Crusades, "God wills it."

Ah! but you will cry out, "What a chatterbox!" All the people
round me say, on the contrary, "Mademoiselle is very taciturn."

O. d'Este M.

CHAPTER XI. WHAT COMES OF CORRESPONDENCE

The foregoing letters seemed very original to the persons from whom the
author of the "Comedy of Human Life" obtained them; but their interest
in this duel, this crossing of pens between two minds, may not be
shared. For every hundred readers, eighty might weary of the battle.
The respect due to the majority in every nation under a constitutional
government, leads us, therefore, to suppress eleven other letters
exchanged between Ernest and Modeste during the month of September. If,
later on, some flattering majority should arise to claim them, let us
hope that we can then find means to insert them in their proper place.

Urged by a mind that seemed as aggressive as the heart was lovable, the
truly chivalrous feelings of the poor secretary gave themselves free
play in these suppressed letters, which seem, perhaps, more beautiful
than they really are, because the imagination is charmed by a sense of
the communion of two free souls. Ernest's whole life was now wrapped up
in these sweet scraps of paper; they were to him what banknotes are to a
miser; while in Modeste's soul a deep love took the place of her delight
in agitating a glorious life, and being, in spite of distance, its
mainspring. Ernest's heart was the complement of Canalis's glory. Alas!
it often takes two men to make a perfect lover, just as in literature
we compose a type by collecting the peculiarities of several similar
characters. How many a time a woman has been heard to say in her own
salon after close and intimate conversations: