he made up his mind to ask Manon to marry him, and now he coolly waited six or seven months more to reconsider his resolution. Her letter had, perhaps, too ably put before him all the disadvantages of such a connection. The fatal cogency of Manon's arguments seems to have had a sobering effect on her suitors generally. But certainly Roland would have been more lover-like if, scattering all arguments to the winds, he had at once pressed his suit more hotly than before. The six months' delay did him an irreparable mischief, Madame Roland confesses "that it stripped every illusion from such sentiments as she had entertained for him." He came at last, however, conversed with the recluse behind the grating of the convent, saw her looking more blooming and brilliant than ever in her sober garb, and felt all his old feelings reviving with increased force at sight of her.
On the 27th of January 1780, Manon wrote informing her friends of her engagement. Her letter, devoid of any vibration of passion, breathes a spirit of calm content. "A succession of sweet and manifold duties will henceforth fill my heart and every moment of my life; I shall no longer be this isolated creature, lamenting her uselessness and striving to prevent the ills of a morbid sensitiveness by incessant activity." In her Memoirs she says: "If marriage, as I considered, were a stringent tie, an association where the woman undertakes to make the happiness of two people, was it not possible that I should practice my courage and abilities in this honourable task rather than in the solitude wherein I lived?"
These reflections were, no doubt, wise and sensible enough, but, concerning this marriage, one might say, in the words of Lord Beaconsfield: "It was not in the
