Though all is fair in war, I blushed at such
spying and stopped short in my inquiries. You have roused my
curiosity; forgive me for being somewhat of a woman; it is, I
believe, the privilege of a poet.
Now that I have laid bare my heart and allowed you to read it, you
will believe in the sincerity of what I am about to add. Though
the glimpse I had of you was all too rapid, it has sufficed to
modify my opinion of your conduct. You are a poet and a poem, even
more than you are a woman. Yes, there is in you something more
precious than beauty; you are the beautiful Ideal of art, of
fancy. The step you took, blamable as it would be in an ordinary
young girl, allotted to an every-day destiny, has another aspect
if endowed with the nature which I now attribute to you. Among the
crowd of beings flung by fate into the social life of this planet
to make up a generation there are exceptional souls. If your
letter is the outcome of long poetic reveries on the fate which
conventions bring to women, if, constrained by the impulse of a
lofty and intelligent mind, you have wished to understand the life
of a man to whom you attribute the gift of genius, to the end that
you may create a friendship withdrawn from the ordinary relations
of life, with a soul in communion with your own, disregarding thus
the ordinary trammels of your sex,--then, assuredly, you are an
exception.
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