being over, she was embarked for good and all upon her greatest adventure.  What she experienced at that moment was something like a religious conversion.  Her past fell away from her a dead thing; she was overwhelmed by an ineffable vision; she, who had wandered for so many years in the ways of worldly indifference, was uplifted all at once on to a strange summit, and pierced with the intensest pangs of an unknown devotion.  Henceforward her life was dedicated; but, unlike the happier saints of a holier persuasion, she was to find no peace on earth.  It was, indeed, hardly to be expected that Walpole, a blase bachelor of fifty, should have reciprocated so singular a passion; yet he might at least have treated it with gentleness and respect.  The total impression of him which these letters produce is very damaging.  It is true that he was in a difficult position; and it is also true that, since only the merest fragments of his side of the correspondence have been preserved, our knowledge of the precise details of his conduct is incomplete; nevertheless, it is clear that, on the whole, throughout the long and painful episode, the principal motive which actuated him was an inexcusable egoism.  He was obsessed by a fear of ridicule.  He knew that letters were regularly opened at the French Post Office, and he lived in terror lest some spiteful story of his absurd relationship with a blind old woman of seventy should be concocted and set afloat among his friends, or his enemies, in England, which would make him the laughing-stock of society for the rest of his days.  He was no less terrified by the intensity of the sentiment of which he had become the object.  Thoroughly superficial and thoroughly selfish, immersed in his London life of dilettantism and gossip, the weekly letters from France with their burden of a desperate affection appalled him and bored him by turns.  He did not know what to do; and his perplexity was increased by the fact that he really liked Madame du Deffand—­so far as he could like anyone—­and also by the fact that his vanity was highly flattered by her letters.  Many courses were open to him, but the one he took was probably the most cruel that he could have taken:  he insisted with an absolute rigidity on their correspondence being conducted in the tone of the most ordinary friendship—­on those terms alone, he said, would he consent to continue it.  And of course such terms were impossible to Madame du Deffand.  She accepted them—­what else could she do?—­but every line she wrote was a denial of them.  Then, periodically, there was an explosion.  Walpole stormed, threatened, declared he would write no more; and on her side there were abject apologies, and solemn promises of amendment.  Naturally, it was all in vain.  A few months later he would be attacked by a fit of the gout, her solicitude would be too exaggerated, and the same fury was repeated, and the same submission.  One wonders what the charm could have been that held that proud old spirit