But my proceedings, dear Chrysale, have at least the merit of not binding us personally. I know that love has its illusions, and every illusion its to-morrow. That is why there are so many partings among lovers vowed to each other for life. The proof of love lies in two things,--suffering and happiness. When, after passing through these double trials of life two beings have shown each other their defects as well as their good qualities, when they have really observed each other’s character, then they may go to their grave hand in hand. My dear Argante, who told you that our little drama thus begun was to have no future? In any case shall we not have enjoyed the pleasures of our correspondence? I await your orders, monseigneur, and I am with all my heart, Your handmaiden, O. d’Este M. To Mademoiselle O. d’Este M.,--You are a witch, a spirit, and I love you! Is that what you desire of me, most original of girls? Perhaps you are only seeking to amuse your provincial leisure with the follies which are you able to make a poet commit. If so, you have done a bad deed. Your two letters have enough of the spirit of mischief in them to force this doubt into the mind of a Parisian. But I am no longer master of myself; my life, my future depend on the answer you will make me. Tell me if the certainty of an unbounded affection, oblivious of all social conventions, will touch you,--if you will suffer me to seek you. There is anxiety enough and uncertainty enough in the question as to whether I can personally please you. If your reply is favorable I change my life, I bid adieu to all the irksome pleasures which we have the folly to call happiness. Happiness, my dear and beautiful unknown, is what you dream it to be,--a fusion of feelings, a perfect accordance of souls, the imprint of a noble ideal (such as God does permit us to form in this low world) upon the trivial round of daily life whose habits we must needs obey, a constancy of heart more precious far than what we call fidelity. Can we say that we make sacrifices when the end in view is our eternal good, the dream of poets, the dream of maidens, the poem which, at the entrance of life when thought essays its wings, each noble intellect has pondered and caressed only to see it shivered to fragments on some stone of stumbling as hard as it is vulgar?--for to the great majority of men, the foot of reality steps instantly on that mysterious egg so seldom hatched.