ove for you;
otherwise I should greatly prefer to remain where I am. My father
seems not well; from time to time he feels a strange numbness on
the whole of his left side. At my urgent entreaties he has seen a
physician, but I am quite sure the physic he received is safely stowed
away in a cupboard, according to an old custom he has. Once he opened
the mysterious receptacle and showed me a whole collection of bottles,
pill-boxes, and powders, saying: "For mercy's sake! this would kill
a strong man, let alone a sick one." Up to now, this quaint way of
looking upon medicine has not done him any harm, but I am troubled
about the future. Another reason for my unwillingness to go is my
aunt's plan of campaign. Of course she is anxious to see me married. I
do not know whether she has anything definite in view. God grant I
may be wrong; but she does not deny the intention. "About an eligible
_parti_ like you," she writes, "there will be at once a war of the
roses, you may be sure of that." I am tired and do not wish for any
war, and least of all to end it like Henry VII. by a marriage. On the
other hand,--I dare not tell my aunt, but may confess it to myself,--I
do not like Polish women. I am thirty-five, and like other men that
live much in society, I had my sentimental passages, among others,
with Polish women, and from these encounters I carried away the
impression that they are the most impossible and most wearying women
in the world. I do not know whether, generally speaking, they are more
virtuous than their French or Italian sisters; I only know that they
are more pathetic. The very remembrance of it gives me a creepy
sensation. I can understand an elegy over a broken pitcher when you
behold the shards for the first time; but to go on with the same
pathos over a much mended pitcher, looks more like a comic opera. A
pleasant role that of the listener, whom courtesy bids to take it
seriously.

Strange, fantastic women with fiery imagination and cold temperaments!
In their sentiments there is neither cheerfulness nor even simplicity.
They are in love with the outward forms of love, caring less for
its intrinsic value. With French or Italian women after the first
skirmishes, you may be sure of your "ergo." With a Pole it is
different. Somebody said that if a man is mistaken and says two and
two makes five, you may be able to set him right; a woman says two and
two is a lamp, and you come against a blank wall. In a Polish w