secret to the last, though she might never look on its original again?
The real and the ideal had so acted on each other, that while he seemed to her the perfection of all manhood should be, that very type was unconsciously but a faithful copy of himself. In short, she loved him; and when such a man is loved by such a woman it is usually but little conducive to his happiness, and thoroughly destructive of her own.
If I have mistaken the originator of so beautiful and touching an illustration, I humbly beg his pardon, but I think it is Alphonse Karr who teaches, in his remarks on the great idolatry of all times and nations, that it is well to sow plenty of flowers in that prolific soil which is fertilised by the heart's sunshine and watered by its tears—plenty of flowers, the brighter, the sweeter, the more fragile, perhaps, the better. Winter may cut them down indeed to the cold earth, yet spring-time brings another crop as fair, as fresh, as fragile, and as easily replaced as those that bloomed before. But it is unwise to plant a tree; because, if that tree be once torn up by the roots, the flowers will never grow over the barren place again!
The Marquise had not indeed planted the tree, but she had allowed it unwittingly to grow. Perhaps she would never have confessed its existence to herself had it not thus been forcibly torn away by roots that had for years twined deeper and deeper among all its gentlest and all its strongest feelings, till they had become as the very fibres of her heart.
It is needless to say that the Marquise was a woman elevated both by disposition and education above the meaner and pettier weaknesses of her sex. If she was masculine in her physical courage and moral recklessness of consequences, she was masculine also in a certain generosity of spirit and noble disdain for anything like malice or foul-play. Jealousy with her—and, like all strong natures, she could feel jealousy very keenly—would never be visited on the object that had caused it. She would hate and punish herself under the torture; she might even be goaded to hate and punish the man at whose hands she was suffering; but she would never have injured the woman whom she preferred, and, indeed, supported by a scornful
