I am so little of a woman yet
that your confidences--provided they are full and true--will
suffice for the happiness of your
O. d'Este M.
"Good heavens! can I be in love already?" cried the young secretary,
when he perceived that he had held the above letter in his hands more
than an hour after reading it. "What shall I do? She thinks she is
writing to the great poet! Can I continue the deception? Is she a
woman of forty, or a girl of twenty?"
Ernest was now fascinated by the great gulf of the unseen. The unseen
is the obscurity of infinitude, and nothing is more alluring. In that
sombre vastness fires flash, and furrow and color the abyss with
fancies like those of Martin. For a busy man like Canalis, an
adventure of this kind is swept away like a harebell by a mountain
torrent, but in the more unoccupied life of the young secretary, this
charming girl, whom his imagination persistently connected with the
blonde beauty at the window, fastened upon his heart, and did as much
mischief in his regulated life as a fox in a poultry-yard. La Briere
allowed himself to be preoccupied by this mysterious correspondent;
and he answered her last letter with another, a pretentious and
carefully studied epistle, in which, however, passion begins to reveal
itself through pique.
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