"Paris is the most charming place! The only pity is that it has inhabitants! Not but that they are agreeable, for they are only too much so; only they are also very careless, and appear to my view to live and die without reflecting much on what they are doing. It is not their fault; they have no time. "Without leaving Paris, they are incessant travellers, eternally distracted by motion and novelty. Other travellers, when they have visited some distant corner--forgetting for a while their families, their duties, and their homes--return and settle down again. But these Parisians never do. Their life is an endless voyage; they have no home. That which elsewhere is the great aim of life is secondary here. One has here, as elsewhere, an establishment--a house, a private chamber. One must have. Here one is wife or mother, husband or father, just as elsewhere; but, my poor mother, they are these things just as little as possible. The whole interest centres not in the homes; but in the streets, the museums, the salons, the theatres, and the clubs. It radiates to the immense outside life, which in all its forms night and day agitates Paris, attracts, excites, and enervates you; steals your time, your mind, your soul--and devours them all! "Paris is the most delicious of places to visit--the worst of places to live in. "Understand well, my mother, that in seeking by what qualifies I can best attract my husband--who is the best of men, doubtless, but of Parisian men nevertheless--I have continually reflected on merits which may be seen at once, which do not require time to be appreciated. "Finally, I do not deny that all this is miserable cynicism, unworthy of you and of myself; for you know I am not at heart a bad little woman. Certainly, if I could keep Monsieur de Camors for a year or two at an old chateau in the midst of a solitary wood, I should like it much. I could then see him more frequently, I could then become familiar with his august person, and could develop my little talents under his charmed eyes. But then this might weary him and would be too easy. Life and happiness, I know, are not so easily managed. All is difficulty, peril, and conflict. "What joy, then, to conquer! And I swear to you, my mother, that I will conquer! I will force him to know me as you know me; to love me, not as he now does, but as you do, for many good reasons of which he does not yet dream. "Not that he believes me absolutely a fool; I think he has abandoned that idea for at least two days past. "How he came thus to think, my next letter shall explain. "Your own "MARIE." CHAPTER XVI THE REPTILE STRIVES TO CLIMB