“So it might, in your case,” replied I; “for you never will love a man, only your idea of one.  You will go on enjoying your mighty theories and dreams till suddenly the juice of that ‘little western flower’ drips on your eyelids, and then I shall have the pleasure of seeing you caress ’the fair large ears’ of some donkey, and hang rapturously upon its bray, till you perhaps discover that he has pretended, on your account solely, to like roses, when he has a natural proclivity to thistles; and then, pitiable child! you will discover what you have been caressing, and—­I spare you conclusions; only, for my part, I pity the animal!  Now Jane Eyre was a highly practical person; she knew the man she loved was only a man, and rather a bad specimen at that; she was properly indignant at this further development of his nature, but reflecting in cool blood, afterward, that it was only his nature, and finding it proper and legal to marry him, she did so, to the great satisfaction of herself and the public. You would have made a new ideal of St. John Rivers, who was infinitely the best material of the two, and possibly gone on to your dying day in the belief that his cold and hard soul was only the adamant of the seraph, encouraged in that belief by his real and high principle,—­ a thing that went for sounding brass with that worldly-wise little philosopher, Jane, because it did not act more practically on his inborn traits.”

“Bah!” said Josephine, “when did you turn gypsy, Sally?  You ought to sell dukkeripen, and make your fortune.  Why don’t you unfold Letty’s fate?”

“No,” said I, laughing.  “Don’t you know that the afflatus always exhausts the priestess?  You may tell Letty’s fortune, or mine, if you will; but my power is gone.”

“I can tell yours easily, O Sibyl!” replied she.  “You will never marry, neither for real nor ideal.  You should have fallen in love in the orthodox way, when you were seventeen.  You are adaptive enough to have moulded yourself into any nature that you loved, and constant enough to have clung to it through good and evil.  You would have been a model wife, and a blessed mother.  But now—­you are too old, my dear; you have seen too much; you have not hardened yourself, but you have learned to see too keenly into other people.  You don’t respect men, ‘except exceptions’; and you have seen so much matrimony that is harsh and unlovable, that you dread it; and yet—­Don’t look at me that way, Sarah!  I shall cry!—­My dear! my darling!  I did not mean to hurt you.—­I am a perfect fool!—­Do please look at me with your old sweet eyes again!—­How could I!”——­

“Look at Letty,” said I, succeeding at last in a laugh.  And really Letty was comical to look at; she was regarding Josephine and me with her eyes wide open like two blue larkspur flowers, her little red lips apart, and her whole pretty surface face quite full of astonishment.

“Wasn’t that a nice little tableau, Letty?” said Josephine, with preternatural coolness.  “You looked so sleepy, I thought I’d wake you up with a bit of a scene from ‘Lara Aboukir, the Pirate Chief’; you know we have a great deal of private theatricals at Baltimore; you should see me in that play as Flashmoria, the Bandit’s Bride.”