Letters of Two Brides

And yet Frenchmen are said to be fickle!

The men are hideous anyway, whatever they put on their heads. I have

seen nothing but worn, hard faces, with no calm nor peace in the

expression; the harsh lines and furrows speak of foiled ambition and

smarting vanity. A fine forehead is rarely seen.

"And these are the product of Paris!" I said to Miss Griffith.

"Most cultivated and pleasant men," she replied. I was silent.

The heart of a spinster of thirty-six is a well of

tolerance. In the evening I went to the ball, where I kept close to my mother's

side. She gave me her arm with a devotion which did not miss its

reward. All the honors were for her; I was made the pretext for

charming compliments. She was clever enough to find me fools for my

partners, who one and all expatiated on the heat and the beauty of the

ball, till you might suppose I was freezing and blind. Not one failed

to enlarge on the strange, unheard-of, extraordinary, odd, remarkable

fact--that he saw me for the first time.

My dress, which dazzled me as I paraded alone in my white-and-gold

drawing-room, was barely noticeable amidst the gorgeous finery of most

of the married women. Each had her band of faithful followers, and

they all watched each other askance. A few were radiant in triumphant

beauty, and amongst these was my mother. A girl at a ball is a mere

dancing-machine--a thing of no consequence whatever.

The men, with rare exceptions, did not impress me more favorably here

than at the Champs-Elysees. They have a used-up look; their features

are meaningless, or rather they have all the same meaning. The proud,

stalwart bearing which we find in the portraits of our ancestors--men

who joined moral to physical vigor--has disappeared. Yet in this

gathering there was one man of remarkable ability, who stood out from

the rest by the beauty of his face. But even he did not rouse in me

the feeling which I should have expected. I do not know his works, and

he is a man of no family. Whatever the genius and the merits of a

plebeian or a commoner, he could never stir my blood. Besides, this

man was obviously so much more taken up with himself than with anybody

else, that I could not but think these great brain-workers must look

on us as things rather than persons. When men of intellectual power

love, they ought to give up writing, otherwise their love is not the

real thing.

The lady of their heart does not come first in all their

thoughts. I seemed to read all this in the bearing of the man I speak

of. I am told he is a professor, orator, and author, whose ambition

makes him the slave of every bigwig.