girl, brilliant and
parentless, transferred from the companionship of Signora Venosta to the
protection of a husband, entertained no belief in the serious attentions
of Graham Vane. Perhaps she exaggerated his worldly advantages, perhaps
she undervalued the warmth of his affections; but it was not within the
range of her experience, confined much to Parisian life, nor in harmony
with her notions of the frigidity and morgue of the English national
character, that a rich and high-born young man, to whom a great career
in practical public life was predicted, should form a matrimonial
alliance with a foreign orphan girl, who, if of gentle birth, had no
useful connections, would bring no correspondent dot, and had been
reared and intended for the profession of the stage. She much more
feared that the result of any attentions on the part of such a man would
be rather calculated to compromise the orphan's name, or at least to
mislead her expectations, than to secure her the shelter of a wedded
home. Moreover, she had cherished plans of her own for Isaura's future.
Madame Savarin had conceived for Gustave Rameau a friendly regard,
stronger than that which Mrs. Morley entertained for Graham Vane, for
it was more motherly. Gustave had been familiarized to her sight and her
thoughts since he had first been launched into the literary world under
her husband's auspices; he had confided to her his mortification in
his failures, his joy in his successes. His beautiful countenance, his
delicate health, his very infirmities and defects, had endeared him
to her womanly heart. Isaura was the wife of all others who, in Madame
Savarin's opinion, was made for Rameau. Her fortune, so trivial beside
the wealth of the Englishman, would be a competence to Rameau; then
that competence might swell into vast riches if Isaura succeeded on the
stage. She found with extreme displeasure that Isaura's mind had become
estranged from the profession to which she had been destined, and
divined that a deference to the Englishman's prejudices had something to
do with that estrangement. It was not to be expected that a Frenchwoman,
wife to a sprightly man of letters, who had intimate friends and allies
in every department of the artistic world, should cherish any prejudice
whatever against the exercise of an art in which success achieved riches
and renown; but she was prejudiced, as most Frenchwomen are, against
allowing to unmarried girls the same freedom and i