bey me in everything, even in the
_affair_ of your marriage? Well, I allow you to choose which of the two
you like best for a husband. You have begun by a poem, you shall finish
with a bucolic, and try if you can discover the real character of these
gentlemen here, in the country, on a few hunting or fishing excursions."

Modeste bowed her head and walked home with her father, listening to
what he said but replying only in monosyllables.

CHAPTER XVI. DISENCHANTED

The poor girl had fallen humiliated from the alp she had scaled in
search of her eagle's nest, into the mud of the swamp below, where (to
use the poetic language of an author of our day) "after feeling the
soles of her feet too tender to tread the broken glass of reality,
Imagination--which in that delicate bosom united the whole of womanhood,
from the violet-hidden reveries of a chaste young girl to the passionate
desires of the sex--had led her into enchanted gardens where, oh, bitter
sight! she now saw, springing from the ground, not the sublime flower
of her fancy, but the hairy, twisted limbs of the black mandragora."
Modeste suddenly found herself brought down from the mystic heights of
her love to a straight, flat road bordered with ditches,--in short the
work-day path of common life. What ardent, aspiring soul would not have
been bruised and broken by such a fall? Whose feet were these at which
she had shed her thoughts? The Modeste who re-entered the Chalet was no
more the Modeste who had left it two hours earlier than an actress in
the street is like an actress on the boards. She fell into a state of
numb depression that was pitiful to see. The sun was darkened, nature
veiled itself, even the flowers no longer spoke to her. Like all young
girls with a tendency to extremes, she drank too deeply of the cup of
disillusion. She fought against reality, and would not bend her neck
to the yoke of family and conventions; it was, she felt, too heavy,
too hard, too crushing. She would not listen to the consolations of her
father and mother, and tasted a sort of savage pleasure in letting her
soul suffer to the utmost.

"Poor Butscha was right," she said one evening.

The words indicate the distance she travelled in a short space of time
and in gloomy sadness across the barren plain of reality. Sadness, when
caused by the overgrowth of hope, is a disease,--sometimes a fatal one.
It would be no mean object for physiology to search out in what ways
an