Finding him not defenceless on the score of reason, she shifted her ground and appealed to his delicacy.  On this he appealed to her love, and then calm reason was jostled off the field, and passion and sentiment battled in her place.

In these contests day by day renewed, Camille had many advantages.

Rose, though she did not like him, had now declared on his side.  She refused to show him the least attention.  This threw him on Josephine:  and when Josephine begged her to help reduce Camille to reason, her answer would be,—­

“Hypocrite!” with a kiss:  or else she would say, with a half comic petulance, “No! no!  I am on his side.  Give him his own way, or he will make us all four miserable.”

Thus Josephine’s ally went over to the enemy.

And then this coy young lady’s very power of resistance began to give way.  She had now battled for months against her own heart:  first for her mother; then, in a far more terrible conflict for Raynal, for honor and purity; and of late she had been battling, still against her own heart, for delicacy, for etiquette, things very dear to her, but not so great, holy, and sustaining as honor and charity that were her very household gods:  and so, just when the motives of resistance were lowered, the length of the resistance began to wear her out.

For nothing is so hard to her sex as a long steady struggle.  In matters physical, this is the thing the muscles of the fair cannot stand; in matters intellectual and moral, the long strain it is that beats them dead.

Do not look for a Bacona, a Newtona, a Handella, a Victoria Huga.

Some American ladies tell us education has stopped the growth of these.

No! mesdames.  These are not in nature.

They can bubble letters in ten minutes that you could no more deliver to order in ten days than a river can play like a fountain.  They can sparkle gems of stories:  they can flash little diamonds of poems.  The entire sex has never produced one opera nor one epic that mankind could tolerate:  and why? these come by long, high-strung labor.  But, weak as they are in the long run of everything but the affections (and there giants), they are all overpowering while their gallop lasts.  Fragilla shall dance any two of you flat on the floor before four o’clock, and then dance on till the peep of day.

Only you trundle off to your business as usual, and could dance again the next night, and so on through countless ages.

She who danced you into nothing is in bed, a human jelly tipped with headache.

What did Josephine say to Rose one day?  “I am tired of saying ’No! no! no! no! no!’ forever and ever to him I love.”

But this was not all.  She was not free from self-reproach.  Camille’s faith in her had stood firm.  Hers in him had not.  She had wronged him, first by believing him false, then by marrying another.  One day she asked his pardon for this.  He replied that he had forgiven that; but would she be good enough to make him forget it?