should not have found herself conclusively “upset,” sickened beyond repair, or otherwise morally bankrupt, on her having to recognise in her daughter’s hideous perversity and depravity, as we learn these things to have been, certain inevitabilities of consequence from the social air of the maternal circle, is really a monumental fact in respect to our great woman’s elasticity, her instinct for never abdicating by mere discouragement. Here in especial we get the broad male note—it being so exactly the manly part, and so very questionably the womanly, not to have to draw from such imputations of responsibility too crushing a self-consciousness. Of the extent and variety of danger to which the enjoyment of a moral tone could be exposed and yet superbly survive Madame Karénine’s pages give us the measure; they offer us in action the very ideal of an exemplary triumph of character and mind over one of the very highest tides of private embarrassment that it is well possible to conceive. And it is no case of that _passive_ acceptance of deplorable matters which has abounded in the history of women, even distinguished ones, whether to the pathetic or to the merely scandalous effect; the acceptance is active, constructive, almost exhilarated by the resources of affirmation and argument that it has at its command. The whole instance is sublime in its sort, thanks to the acuteness of _all_ its illustrative sides, the intense interest of which loses nothing in the hands of our chronicler; who perhaps, however, reaches off into the vast vague of Chopin’s native affiliations and references with an energy with which we find it a little difficult to keep step.