improvisation, beautiful as this was, that the extraordinary woman holds us, but by the force of her ability to act herself out, given the astounding quantities concerned in this self. That energy too, we feel, was in a manner an improvisation—so closely allied somehow are both the currents, the flow of literary composition admirably instinctive and free, and the handling power, as we are constantly moved to call it, the flow of a splendid intelligence all the while at its fullest expressional ease, for the _actual_ situations created by her, for whatever it might be that vitally confronted her. Of how to bring about, or at the least find one’s self “in for,” an inordinate number of situations, most of them of the last difficulty, and then deal with them on the spot, in the narrowest quarters as it were, with an eloquence and a plausibility that does them and one’s own nature at once a sort of ideal justice, the demonstration here is the fullest—as of what it was further to have her unfailing verbal as well as her unfailing moral inspiration. What predicament could have been more of an hourly strain for instance, as we cannot but suppose, than her finding herself inevitably accompanied by her two children during the stay at Majorca made by Chopin in ’38 under her protection? The victory of assurance and of the handling power strikes us as none the less never an instant in doubt, that being essentially but over the general _kind_ of inconvenience or embarrassment involved for a mother and a friend in any real consistency of attempt to carry things off male fashion. We do not, it is true, see a man as a mother, any more than we easily see a woman as a gentleman—and least of all perhaps in either case as an awkwardly placed one; but we see Madame Sand as a sufficiently bustling, though rather a rough and ready, father, a father accepting his charge and doing the best possible under the circumstances; the truth being of course that the circumstances never _can_ be, even at the worst, or still at the best, the best for parental fondness, so awkward for him as for a mother.