Again adieu. III PARIS. Your reproaches please me greatly. I am, indeed, predestined by the fairies. I ask myself often what I am to you, and what you are to me. To the first question I can have no reply; as for the second, I fancy that I love you as if you were a fourteen-year-old niece of whom I were the guardian. As for your exceedingly moral relative, who has so much ill to say of me, he reminds me of Thwackum, who is always saying, “Can any virtue exist without religion?” Have you read _Tom Jones_?--a book as immoral as all of mine together. If it has been forbidden you, I am confident you have read it. What a farce of an education is that which you are getting in England! What does it amount to? People lose their breath preaching to a young girl, and the result is that this young girl desires to know the identical immoral being for whom people flatter themselves they have given her an aversion. What an admirable story is that of the serpent! I wish Lady M---- could read this letter. Fortunately, she would faint about the tenth line. Turning the page, I have reread what I have just written, and it seems to me that there is very little coherence and connection of ideas. That is a fault of mine, but I write just as I think, and as my thoughts are more rapid than my pen, the consequence is that I am forced to omit all the transitions. I should, perhaps, follow your example, and erase all the first page; but I prefer to resign it to you for reflection and curl-papers. I must confess, too, that just at this moment I am deeply absorbed in an affair which, I avow to my shame, dwells stubbornly in one-half of my brain, while the other half is entirely filled with you. The portrait which you draw of yourself I like tolerably well. It does not flatter you any too much, and all that I know of you pleases me prodigiously.... I am studying you with the liveliest curiosity. I have theories about the most trifling things, about gloves, about boots, about curls, etc., and I attach great importance to such things, because I have discovered that there is an actual relation between the temperament of women and the caprice (or, to express it better, the connection of ideas and the reasoning) which causes them to choose such and such a fabric. Thus, for instance, it is for me to have demonstrated that a woman who wears blue gowns is a coquette, and poses as a sentimentalist. The demonstration is easy, but it would take too long. How should you like it if I were to send you a wretchedly bad water-colour, larger than this sheet, and which could be neither rolled nor folded? Wait until I can make you a smaller one, that can be sent in a letter.