With me, dear Roger, Louise Guerin the grisette has vanished; but Louise Guerin, a charming and fascinating creature whom any one would be proud to love, has taken her place.  You know that with all my oddities, my wilfulness, my Huronisms as you call them, the slightest equivocal word, the least approach to a bold jest, uttered by feminine lips shocks me.  Louise has never, in the many conversations that I have had with her, alarmed my captious modesty; and often the most innocent young girls, the virtuous mothers of a family, have made me blush up to my eyes.  I am by no means so prudish; I discourse upon Trimalcion’s feast and the orgies of the twelve Caesars, but certain expressions, used by every one, never pass my lips; I imagine that I see toads and serpents drop from the tongues of those who speak them:  only roses and pearls fall from Louise’s lips.  How many women have fallen in my eyes from the rank of a goddess to the condition of a fishwoman, by one word whose ignominy I might try in vain to make them understand!

I have told you all this, my dear Roger, so that you may see how from an ordinary railway adventure, a slight flirtation, has resulted a serious and genuine love.  I treat myself and things with rough frankness, and closely scan my head and heart, and arrive at the same result—­I am desperately in love with Louise.  The result does not alarm me; I have never shrunk from happiness.  It is my peculiar style of courage, which is rarer than you imagine; I have seen men who would seek the bubble reputation even in the cannon’s mouth, who had not the courage to be happy!

Since her return Louise appears thoughtful and agitated; a change has come over the spirit of her dream.  It is evident that her journey has thrown new light upon her situation.  Something important has taken place in her life.  What is it?  I neither know nor care to know.  I accept Louise as I find her with her present surroundings.  Perhaps absence has revealed to her, as it has to me, that another existence is necessary to her.  This at least is certain, she is less shy, less reserved, more confiding; there is a tender grace in her manner unfelt before.  When we walk in the garden, she leans upon my arm, instead of touching it with the tips of her fingers.  Now, when I am with her, her cold reserve begins to thaw, and instead of going on with her work, as formerly, she rests her head on her hand and gazes at me with a dreamy fixedness singular to behold.  She seems to be mentally deliberating something, and trying to come to a conclusion.  May Eros, with his golden arrows, grant that it prove favorable to me!  It will prove so, or human will has no power, and the magnetic fluid is an error!

We are sometimes alone, but that cursed door is never shut, and Madame Taverneau paces up and down outside, coming in at odd moments to enliven the conversation with a witticism, in which exercise the good woman, unhappily, thinks she excels.  She fears that Louise, who is not accustomed to the usages of society, may tire me.  I am neither a Nero nor a Caligula, but many a time have I mentally condemned the honest post-mistress to the wild beasts of the Circus!