"I had written regularly to my betrothed every month--beautiful diary-like love-letters--and had received with equal regularity letters from her, which, to speak honestly, had now and then irritated me greatly; so that we had already had (on paper) all manner of misunderstandings, tiffs, quarrels, and reconciliations. I considered that all this belonged of right to a well-conducted three-years' engagement, and did not take it too much to heart when my well-bred, rather provincial little sweetheart, who had grown up in the atmosphere of the petty capital, occasionally gave her vagabond _fiancé_ a little moral lesson. Perhaps I was wrong, and certainly I was foolish, always to report my varied adventures with absolute candor. There were no very serious matters among them; and the few cases of real human weaknesses and sins I kept to myself--shut up in a sincerely remorseful heart. But she found fault even with the _tone_ of my 'sketches from two hemispheres.' Good heavens! it is easily comprehensible that the poor child, living as she did among such absurd surroundings, could not have much taste for a free life out in the world! Thrown entirely on herself, watched over by a hundred eyes in a narrow, starched, formal society--I once wrote to her that she was only so serious beyond her years because she had had to fill, as it were, a mother's place to herself, and be her own governess and duenna. And, besides all this, there was her uncle's frightful example--for she could not long remain ignorant of his habit of compensating himself for outward respectability by private orgies at his bachelor clubs and _petits soupers_. "Only let the three years be over, I thought to myself, and we will soon weed out the tares that have sprung up between our roses. But I did not know the vigor of the ground in which all this bad crop had grown up. Nor did I know how much the years between seventeen and twenty signified in such a girl's life.