to modify my opinion of your conduct.  You are a poet and a poem, even more than you are a woman.  Yes, there is in you something more precious than beauty; you are the beautiful Ideal of art, of fancy.  The step you took, blamable as it would be in an ordinary young girl, allotted to an every-day destiny, has another aspect if endowed with the nature which I now attribute to you.  Among the crowd of beings flung by fate into the social life of this planet to make up a generation there are exceptional souls.  If your letter is the outcome of long poetic reveries on the fate which conventions bring to women, if, constrained by the impulse of a lofty and intelligent mind, you have wished to understand the life of a man to whom you attribute the gift of genius, to the end that you may create a friendship withdrawn from the ordinary relations of life, with a soul in communion with your own, disregarding thus the ordinary trammels of your sex,—­then, assuredly, you are an exception.  The law which rightly limits the actions of the crowd is too limited for you.  But in that case, the remark in my first letter returns in greater force,—­you have done too much or not enough.

Accept once more my thanks for the service you have rendered me, that of compelling me to sound my heart.  You have corrected in me the false idea, only too common in France, that marriage should be a means of fortune.  While I struggled with my conscience a sacred voice spoke to me.  I swore solemnly to make my fortune myself, and not be led by motives of cupidity in choosing the companion of my life.  I have also reproached myself for the blamable curiosity you have excited in me.  You have not six millions.  There is no concealment possible in Havre for a young lady who possesses such a fortune; you would be discovered at once by the pack of hounds of great families whom I see in Paris on the hunt after heiresses, and who have already sent one, the grand equerry, the young duke, among the Vilquins.  Therefore, believe me, the sentiments I have now expressed are fixed in my mind as a rule of life, from which I have abstracted all influences of romance or of actual fact.  Prove to me, therefore, that you have one of those souls which may be forgiven for its disobedience to the common law, by perceiving and comprehending the spirit of this letter as you did that of my first letter.  If you are destined to a middle-class life, obey the iron law which holds society together.  Lifted in mind above other women, I admire you; but if you seek to obey an impulse which you ought to repress, I pity you.  The all-wise moral of that great domestic epic “Clarissa Harlowe” is that legitimate and honorable love led the poor victim to her ruin because it was conceived, developed, and pursued beyond the boundaries of family restraint.  The family, however cruel and even foolish it may be, is in the right against the Lovelaces.  The family is Society.  Believe me, the glory of a young girl, of a woman, must always be that of