There is, in truth, a charming and permissible
coquetry, that of the soul, which may claim to be love's politeness.
Charles Mignon, when scolding his daughter, failed to distinguish
between the mere desire of pleasing and the love of the mind,--the
thirst for love, and the thirst for admiration. Like every true
colonel of the Empire he saw in this correspondence, rapidly read,
only the young girl who had thrown herself at the head of a poet; but
in the letters which we were forced to lack of space to suppress, a
better judge would have admired the dignified and gracious reserve
which Modeste had substituted for the rather aggressive and
light-minded tone of her first letters. The father, however, was only
too cruelly right on one point. Modeste's last letter, which we have
read, had indeed spoken as though the marriage were a settled fact,
and the remembrance of that letter filled her with shame; she thought
her father very harsh and cruel to force her to receive a man unworthy
of her, yet to whom her soul had flown, as it were, bare. She
questioned Dumay about his interview with the poet, she inveigled him
into relating its every detail, and she did not think Canalis as
barbarous as the lieutenant had declared him.
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