your addresses.”  It revolts me:  I desire that actual marriage shall be the result of a previous and long marriage of souls.  A young girl, a woman, has throughout her life only this one moment when reflection, second sight, and experience are necessary to her.  She plays her liberty, her happiness, and she is not allowed to throw the dice; she risks her all, and is forced to be a mere spectator.  I have the right, the will, the power to make my own unhappiness, and I use them, as did my mother, who, won by beauty and led by instinct, married the most generous, the most liberal, the most loving of men.  I know that you are free, a poet, and noble-looking.  Be sure that I should not have chosen one of your brothers in Apollo who was already married.  If my mother was won by beauty, which is perhaps the spirit of form, why should I not be attracted by the spirit and the form united?  Shall I not know you better by studying you in this correspondence than I could through the vulgar experience of “receiving your addresses”?  This is the question, as Hamlet says.

But my proceedings, dear Chrysale, have at least the merit of not binding us personally.  I know that love has its illusions, and every illusion its to-morrow.  That is why there are so many partings among lovers vowed to each other for life.  The proof of love lies in two things,—­suffering and happiness.  When, after passing through these double trials of life two beings have shown each other their defects as well as their good qualities, when they have really observed each other’s character, then they may go to their grave hand in hand.  My dear Argante, who told you that our little drama thus begun was to have no future?  In any case shall we not have enjoyed the pleasures of our correspondence?

  I await your orders, monseigneur, and I am with all my heart,

Your handmaiden,

O. d’Este M.

To Mademoiselle O. d’Este M.,—­You are a witch, a spirit, and I love you!  Is that what you desire of me, most original of girls?  Perhaps you are only seeking to amuse your provincial leisure with the follies which are you able to make a poet commit.  If so, you have done a bad deed.  Your two letters have enough of the spirit of mischief in them to force this doubt into the mind of a Parisian.  But I am no longer master of myself; my life, my future depend on the answer you will make me.  Tell me if the certainty of an unbounded affection, oblivious of all social conventions, will touch you,—­if you will suffer me to seek you.  There is anxiety enough and uncertainty enough in the question as to whether I can personally please you.  If your reply is favorable I change my life, I bid adieu to all the irksome pleasures which we have the folly to call happiness.  Happiness, my dear and beautiful unknown, is what you dream it to be,—­a fusion of feelings, a perfect accordance of souls, the imprint of a noble ideal (such as God does permit