Juliet was ready to defy all the Capulets when she had seen Romeo but once; Corinne was ready to fling all her laurels at Oswald’s feet at their second interview; Rosamond Vincy planned her house-furnishing during her second meeting with Lydgate; even Dorothea Brooke felt a “trembling hope” the very next day after her first sight of Mr. Casaubon.  How, then, could one expect poor Clothilde to yield up her undersized, thin-moustached, and very unheroic-looking Henri, having seen him four times?

There was one way out of her troubles,—­that to which Alphonse Daudet’s and Andre Theuriet’s people gravitate as needles to their pole.  She walked one dark midnight upon the jetty alone.  Nobody saw the end; but the next Sunday, three weeks to a day from the one when the two had countermarched in matrimonial procession, Mademoiselle Clothilde was laid in her grave.

The whole French social system revolves around the dot.

“How dare you speak to my father so!” I once heard a daughter reproach her mother.  “How dare you, who brought him no dot!”

“It is a pity Madame Marais has no more influence in her family,” I heard remarked in a social company.  “It is a pity, for she is a good woman, and her husband and sons are all going to the bad.”

“Yes, it is a pity,” answered another; “but, then, what else can she expect?  She brought no dot into the family.”

Once upon a time a young man made a friendly call upon a family in our ville, he a distant relative of the family.  He sat in the salon with mother and daughter, when suddenly the mother was called away a moment.  When she returned, not more than two minutes later,—­horror! she could not enter the room! In closing the door she had somehow disarranged the handles; screws had dropped out and could not be found; the knob would not turn.  What a situation!  A young girl shut up in a locked room with a young man!  What a scandal if the story got out in the town! and what could the poor, distracted mamma do to release her daughter from that damning situation without the knowledge of the servants?  She dared not even summon a locksmith, for locksmith tongues are free; and who would not shoot out the lip at poor Jeanne, hearing the miserable story at breakfast-tables to-morrow?

“You must marry Jeanne, mon cousin,” cried mamma through the keyhole.

“Impossible, ma cousine.  You know I am fiance,” laughed he.

Nevertheless he did!

For when papa heard that Jeanne had remained two whole hours shut up with Cousin Pierre in a brilliantly-lighted salon, with a frantic mother at the keyhole and all the servants grinning upon their knees searching for the missing screws, he added twenty thousand francs to her dot on the spot, and Pierre wrote to his other fiancee that he had “changed his intentions.”

“Mamma’s tapage was too funny,” laughed Madame Pierre, telling me this story herself.  “Pierre and I laughed well on our side of the door, although we were careful not to let maman hear us.  For we had often been alone together before when nobody knew it.”