h little diamonds of poems. The
entire sex has never produced one opera nor one epic that mankind could
tolerate: and why? these come by long, high-strung labor. But, weak as
they are in the long run of everything but the affections (and there
giants), they are all overpowering while their gallop lasts. Fragilla
shall dance any two of you flat on the floor before four o'clock, and
then dance on till the peep of day.

Only you trundle off to your business as usual, and could dance again
the next night, and so on through countless ages.

She who danced you into nothing is in bed, a human jelly tipped with
headache.

What did Josephine say to Rose one day? "I am tired of saying 'No! no!
no! no! no!' forever and ever to him I love."

But this was not all. She was not free from self-reproach. Camille's
faith in her had stood firm. Hers in him had not. She had wronged him,
first by believing him false, then by marrying another. One day she
asked his pardon for this. He replied that he had forgiven that; but
would she be good enough to make him forget it?

"I wish I could."

"You can. Marry me: then your relation to that man will seem but a
hideous dream. I shall be able to say, looking at you, my wife, 'I was
faithful: I suffered something for her; I came home: she loved me still;
the proof is, she was my wife within three months of my return.'"

When he said that to her in the Pleasaunce, if there had been a priest
at hand--. In a word, Josephine longed to show him her love, yet wished
not to shock her mother, nor offend her own sense of delicacy; but
Camille cared for nothing but his love. To sacrifice love and happiness,
even for a time, to etiquette, seemed to him to be trifling with the
substance of great things for the shadow of petty things; and he said
so: sometimes sadly, sometimes almost bitterly.

So Josephine was a beleagured fortress, attacked with one will, and
defended by troops, one-third of which were hot on the side of the
besiegers.

When singleness attacks division, you know the result beforehand. Why
then should I spin words? I will not trace so ill-matched a contest step
by step, sentence by sentence: let me rather hasten to relate the one
peculiarity that arose out of this trite contest, where, under the names
of Camille and Josephine, the two great sexes may be seen acting the
whole world-wide distich,--

"It's a man's part to try,
And a woman's to deny [for a while?]."

Findin