I begin to think that I shall return to the convent.  If I remain in society, I shall do things which will look like follies, for I cannot possibly reconcile myself to what I see.  I am perpetually wounded either in my sense of delicacy, my inner principles, or my secret thoughts.

Ah! my mother is the happiest of women, adored as she is by Canalis, her great little man.  My love, do you know I am seized sometimes with a horrible craving to know what goes on between my mother and that young man?  Griffith tells me she has gone through all these moods; she has longed to fly at women, whose happiness was written in their face; she has blackened their character, torn them to pieces.  According to her, virtue consists in burying all these savage instincts in one’s innermost heart.  But what then of the heart?  It becomes the sink of all that is worst in us.

It is very humiliating that no adorer has yet turned up for me.  I am a marriageable girl, but I have brothers, a family, relations, who are sensitive on the point of honor.  Ah! if that is what keeps men back, they are poltroons.

The part of Chimene in the Cid and that of the Cid delight me.  What a marvelous play!  Well, good-bye.

VIII

THE SAME TO THE SAME
January.

Our master is a poor refugee, forced to keep in hiding on account of the part he played in the revolution which the Duc d’Angouleme has just quelled—­a triumph to which we owe some splendid fetes.  Though a Liberal, and doubtless a man of the people, he has awakened my interest:  I fancy that he must have been condemned to death.  I make him talk for the purpose of getting at his secret; but he is of a truly Castilian taciturnity, proud as though he were Gonsalvo di Cordova, and nevertheless angelic in his patience and gentleness.  His pride is not irritable like Miss Griffith’s, it belongs to his inner nature; he forces us to civility because his own manners are so perfect, and holds us at a distance by the respect he shows us.  My father declares that there is a great deal of the nobleman in Senor Henarez, whom, among ourselves, he calls in fun Don Henarez.

A few days ago I took the liberty of addressing him thus.  He raised his eyes, which are generally bent on the ground, and flashed a look from them that quite abashed me; my dear, he certainly has the most beautiful eyes imaginable.  I asked him if I had offended him in any way, and he said to me in his grand, rolling Spanish: 

“I am here only to teach you Spanish.”

I blushed and felt quite snubbed.  I was on the point of making some pert answer, when I remembered what our dear mother in God used to say to us, and I replied instead: 

“It would be a kindness to tell me if you have anything to complain of.”

A tremor passed through him, the blood rose in his olive cheeks; he replied in a voice of some emotion: 

“Religion must have taught you, better than I can, to respect the unhappy.  Had I been a don in Spain, and lost everything in the triumph of Ferdinand VII., your witticism would be unkind; but if I am only a poor teacher of languages, is it not a heartless satire?  Neither is worthy of a young lady of rank.”