Gabriella, concluding that her situation had been made known to him by Juliet, answered, in a melancholy tone, 'Is this a period, Sir, to consider punctilio? Alas! whence I come, all that are greatest, most ancient, and most noble,[1] have learnt, that self-exertion can alone mark nobility of soul; and that self-dependence only can sustain honour in adversity. Alas, whence I come, the first youth is initiated in the view, if not in the endurance of misfortune! There can be no understanding, or there must be early reflection; there can be no heart, or there must be commiserating sympathy!' [Footnote 1: The period is the reign of Robespierre.] 'I protest, Ma'am,' cried Sir Jaspar, looking at her with astonishment, 'I begin to suspect that I came into the world only this morning! Where I may have been rambling, all these years, in the persuasion I was in it already, I have by no means any clear notion! But to see two such instances of wisdom and resignation, united with youth and beauty, makes me believe myself in some new region, never yet visited by vice or folly.' 'Ah, Sir, the French Revolution has opened our eyes to a species of equality more rational, because more feasible, than that of lands or of rank; an equality not alone of mental sufferings, but of manual exertions. No state of life, however low, or however hard, has been left untried, either by the highest, or by the most delicate, in the various dispersions and desolation of the ancient French nobility. And to see,--as I, alas! have seen,--the willing efforts, the even glad toil, of the remnants of the first families of Europe, to procure,--not luxuries, not elegancies, not even comforts,--but maintenance! mean, laborious maintenance!--to preserve,--not state, not fortune, not rank,--but life itself! but simple existence!'-- 'Very wonderful personage!' cried Sir Jaspar, his air mingling reverence with amazement; 'and what,--unfold to me, I beg, what is the necromancy through which you support, under such toils, your intellectual dignity? and strangle, in its birth, every struggle of false shame?' 'Alas, Sir, I have seen guilt!--Since then, I have thought that shame belonged to nothing else!' The eyes of Sir Jaspar were now suffused with tender admiration. 'Fair deity of the counter!' he cried, 'you are sublime! And she, too,--your witching little handmaid; by what kind, dulcet chance,--new in the annals of misfortune,--have two such wonders met?--' 'Ah, rather, Sir,--since you couple us so kindly,--rather ask by what adverse chance we have so long been separated?' 'You have known her, then, some time?' 'We were brought up together!--the same convent, the same governess, the same instructors, were common to both till my marriage. And now, again,--as before that period,--I have not the most distant idea of any possible happiness, that is not annexed to her presence.'