So, after a silence of two years, you are pricked by curiosity, and want to know why I have not written.  My dear Renee, there are no words, no images, no language to express my happiness.  That we have strength to bear it sums up all I could say.  It costs us no effort, for we are in perfect sympathy.  The whole two years have known no note of discord in the harmony, no jarring word in the interchange of feeling, no shade of difference in our lightest wish.  Not one in this long succession of days has failed to bear its own peculiar fruit; not a moment has passed without being enriched by the play of fancy.  So far are we from dreading the canker of monotony in our life, that our only fear is lest it should not be long enough to contain all the poetic creations of a love as rich and varied in its development as Nature herself.  Of disappointment not a trace!  We find more pleasure in being together than on the first day, and each hour as it goes by discloses fresh reason for our love.  Every day as we take our evening stroll after dinner, we tell each other that we really must go and see what is doing in Paris, just as one might talk of going to Switzerland.

“Only think,” Gaston will exclaim, “such and such a boulevard is being made, the Madeleine is finished.  We ought to see it.  Let us go to-morrow.”

And to-morrow comes, and we are in no hurry to get up, and we breakfast in our bedroom.  Then midday is on us, and it is too hot; a siesta seems appropriate.  Then Gaston wishes to look at me, and he gazes on my face as though it were a picture, losing himself in this contemplation, which, as you may suppose, is not one-sided.  Tears rise to the eyes of both as we think of our love and tremble.  I am still the mistress, pretending, that is, to give less than I receive, and I revel in this deception.  To a woman what can be sweeter than to see passion ever held in check by tenderness, and the man who is her master stayed, like a timid suitor, by a word from her, within the limits that she chooses?

You asked me to describe him; but, Renee, it is not possible to make a portrait of the man we love.  How could the heart be kept out of the work?  Besides, to be frank between ourselves, we may admit that one of the dire effects of civilization on our manners is to make of man in society a being so utterly different from the natural man of strong feeling, that sometimes not a single point of likeness can be found between these two aspects of the same person.  The man who falls into the most graceful operatic poses, as he pours sweet nothings into your ear by the fire at night, may be entirely destitute of those more intimate charms which a woman values.  On the other hand, an ugly, boorish, badly-dressed figure may mark a man endowed with the very genius of love, and who has a perfect mastery over situations which might baffle us with our superficial graces.  A man whose conventional aspect accords with his real nature, who, in the intimacy of wedded love, possesses