had the girl's eyes, but while curiosity, belonging to his years, brightened their sombreness with the promise of surprise and laughter, hers held an expression of permanent sadness and soft untroubled gloom. It was superfluous information on the mother's part, in response to my mention of the poet's name, to indicate her daughter majestically, as if she wished it to be understood that she herself had no part in the production of matter so suspicious in a woman as poetry. I was on the brink of assuring her that nobody would ever deem her capable of such folly, and begging her to return to her stockings as occupation more appropriate than the entertainment of an admirer of the Muse she despised, when Pilar quietly said," Be seated, sir." From

that moment I took no further heed of the Señora Villafranca than if she had been the accommodating dueña of Spanish comedy, and I the unvirtuous, or noble but thwarted, lover who had bribed her. In ten minutes Pilar and I were talking as freely as if we had known one another from infancy; far more freely, possibly, for in the latter case we should long ago have talked ourselves to silence. How do these young girls manage to get hold of books, Rameau, when all the forces of domestic law are exercised to keep them apart? There is not a living Spanish or French writer with whom this child, barely out of her teens, is not acquainted. Her judgment may often be at fault-whose is not, if backed by anything like originality? But to hear her discuss Naturalism! Castrès, puffing his eternal cigarette, walks you through les lieux communs, but this girl takes flights that fairly dazzle you. And then her Pessimism! The queer thing is that she has found it for herself, and Schopenhauer has nothing to do with it. For that matter, nobody living or dead seems to have had anything to do with the forming of her. She is essentially primesautière. You French do manage to hit upon excellent words; primesautière perfectly describes this Spanish maid. She is all herself, first of the mould, fresh, though so burdened with the century's malady. So young, and she believes in nothing-but nothing,

NEW SERIES.-VOL. LXII., No. 5.

Rameau! She hopes for nothing, for nothing! She plays with no emotions, feigns no poetic despairs, utters no paradoxes, and is simplicity itself in her gestures, expressions, and ideas. She calmly rejects all the pretty illusions of her sex, without a pang or regret, because her truth is above personal happiness.

66

"We talked, we talked-talked till far into the night, while the fat mother slumbered noisily in her chair, and the little boy slept curled up at his sister's feet. Can you guess what first put it into my head to go? The smell of the lamp as the wick flickeringly lowered. "Dios mio!" cried Pilar, it is close on two o'clock, and we have been chattering while my mother sleeps comfortlessly in her chair, and my little brother is dreaming on the carpet instead of in his bed. Good-night, sir; I must leave you and carry my baby to bed." She stooped and lifted the sleeping boy with her arms. Such bodily strength in one so frail much astonished me. 1 would have offered her help, but the little lad had already found a comfortable spot in the hollow of her neck, and with a cordial nod to me, she disappeared into the inner room. I had not expected this evidence of womanly tenderness from her, and the picture haunted me on my way down the dark staircase and through the dim starlit streets.'

66

"The extracts from the next letters are singularly characteristic," said Rameau, well pleased by our profound attention. Krowtosky, upon his return to Paris, has taken a third-class ticket from Madrid to Bayonne. To the poet he has said his last farewell, and probably wears upon his heart her precious autograph. Not that Krowtosky is ostensibly sentimental. He rejects the notion of such folly, and if by chance he dropped into pretty fooling, be sure he would find a philosophical way out of the disgrace deservedly attached to such weakness. I am travelling to Bayonne,' he writes,' and I will reach it to-morrow afternoon, but I am convinced that once there I shall straightway take the train back to Madrid.. Odd, is it not? Yet I feel that I shall be compelled to return to that young girl. And this is not love,

43

mark you, Rameau; not in the least. I know all about that. Did I not study it in the case of that young girl I met at Toulouse? Well, nothing I feel for Pilar in any way resembles the foolish sentiment her gestures and looks expressed. I am quite master of myself, and do not hang on any one's lips or glances; but I must see Pilar again. Do you know why I hesitated outside her door that first evening I called upon her? I had a presentiment, as I climbed up those stairs, that I should marry her. We may reject a faith in presentiments, but they shake us nevertheless. How slowly this train goes! The landscape, across which we speed in the leisurely movement of Spanish steam, is flat and ugly, an interminable view of cornfields. There is a wide-hatted priest in front of me with an open breviary in his hand. Perhaps I shall find myself craving service of one of his brothers some day. What an odd fellow I am, to be sure! I intend, oh certainly I intend, to take the Paris train to-morrow night from Bayonne, and as certainly I know I shall find myself on my way back to Madrid. And it cannot be for the pleasure of passing a couple of days and nights in a beastly third-class carriage, which is nothing better here than a cattle

pen.

"Of his reception by the poet, of his sentiments and wooing, he writes very sparingly. His great terror is that I should detect the lover where he insists

there is only a philosopher. Philosophy took him from Madrid, and Philosophy brought him back within fortyeight hours. Philosophy sued, wooed, and won the Muse, and led him to his wedding-morn. While engaged in its service, he writes in this jocose strain the very evening of his marriage: This morning in a dark little church, in a dark little street of Madrid, we were married. Though neither of us believes in anything, we agreed to make the usual concession to conventional feeling and social law, and were married in the most legal and Christianlike fashion. Nothing was lacking, neither rings nor signatures, nor church-bells nor church-fees, nor yet the excellent and venerable fat priest, a degree uglier than myself, who oblig

ingly made us one. While this ceremony was being performed, I could not forget the inconvenient fact that neither of us brought the other much in the shape of promise of future subsistence, not even hope, of which there is not a spark between us. This preoccupa tion distracted me while the priest mumbled and sermonized, and a wicked little French couplet kept running through my head:

Un et un font deux, nombre heureux en galanMais quand un et un font trois, c'est diaterie,

blerie !

Meanwhile the fat priest discoursed to my wife, most excellently, upon the duties and virtues of the true Christian spouse, to which discourse my wife lent an inattentive ear. Perhaps she also was thinking of the future,-somewhat tardily. My dear Rameau, have you ever reflected upon the amazing one-sidedness of religion on these occa sions? Wives are eloquently exhorted to practise all the virtues, and not a word is flung at the husbands. It is something of course for us to learn, by the aid of the Church, that all the duty is on the other side, and that we have nothing to do but command, be worshipped, and fall foul of infidelity. The beautiful logic of man, and the profound pessimism of woman! She never rebels, but accepts all without hope of remedy. The real Pessimists are women. Thev admit the fact that everything is unalterable, evil without amelioration; everything is, and everything will remain to the end. Man occasionally rises up, and takes his oppressor by the throat, but woman

never.

There is a point at which his patience vanishes, but hers is inexhaustible. She is the soul and spirit and body of the malady only diagnosed this century. Conviction that suffering is her only heritage is hers before birth, and she placidly bends to the law of fate often without a murmur, always without the faintest instinct of revolt. Is she an idiot or an angel? The latter rebelled in Paradise; then she must be an idiot. Man is activity, she is inertia; that is why she yields so readily to his ruling. These are thoughts suitable to the marriage of two

Pessimists. There will be on neither side revolt or stupid demands upon destiny. I am simply interested in the development of this strange union of the barbarous North and the barbarous South, and watch this unfamiliar person, my wife, placed in an enervating proximity by a queer social institution. I wonder if she will eventually prove explosive; meantime it is my privilege to kiss her. I have not mentioned it, but she has very sweet lips.'

"After this there is a long lapse of silence. I fear the delights of poor Krowtosky's honeymoon were soon enough disturbed by the grim question of ways and means. As I was only a fair-weather friend in default of the sympathetic confidant voyaging in distant waters, I imagine at this period the traveller must have returned, and received the rest of the journal so wantonly entrusted to me, or Krowtosky must have confided his troubles to his wife. When next I hear from him, it is many months later, and he has just obtained a professorship in a dreary snow-bound place called Thorpfeld. From his description, it is evidently the very last place God Almighty bethought himself of making, and by that time all the materials of comfort, pleasure, and beauty had been exhausted. As Thorpfeld is not my birthplace,' writes Krowtosky, 'I may befoul it to my liking. It contains about seven thousand inhabitants, one poorer and more ignorant than another. What they can want with professors and what the authorities are pleased to call a college the wicked government under which we sweat and suffer and groan alone can tell. Six out of a hundred cannot read, and three of these can barely write. The less reason have they for a vestige of belief in man, the more fervent is their faith in their Creator. Nothing but anticipation of the long-delayed joys of Paradise can keep them from cutting their own and their neighbors' throats. They ought to begin with the professors and the rascally magistrates. As if snow and broken weather were not enough to harass these poor wretches in pursuit of a precarious livelihood, what little money the magistrates or the professors leave them is wrung from them by

the popes. Even Pilar is demoralized by her surroundings. She has left off writing pessimistic poetry, and has betaken herself to Christian charity. "Tisn't much we can do, for we have barely enough to live upon ourselves, but that little she manages to do somehow or other. These hearts of foolish women will ever make them traitor to their heads. I naturally growl when I find our sack of corn diminished in favor of a neighbor's hungry children, or return frost-bitten from the college to find no fire, and learn that my wife has carried a basket of fuel to a peasant dying up among snow-hills. She does not understand these people, and they do not understand her, but they divine her wish to share their wretchedness, her own being hardly less; and then she is a pretty young woman! Timon himself could hardly have spurned her. But where's her pessimism? Has it vanished with the sun and vines of her own, bright land, or has it found a grave in the half-frozen breast of a strange Sister of Charity unknown to me and born of the sight of snow-clad misery such as in Spain is never dreamed of? You see, I am on the road to poetry instead of my poor` changed young wife.

666

Last evening when I came home from a farmer's house, where I had stopped to warm myself with a couple of glasses of vodka, I found her shivering over the remaining sparks of a miserable fire. She looked so white and unhappy and alone, so completely the image of a stranger in a foreign land, to whom I, too, her husband, am a foreigner, that I asked myself, in serious apprehension, if I might not be destined to lose her in the coming crisis.

Pilar," I cried, I cried, "what ails thee?" And when she turned her head, I saw that she was crying silently. "I want my own land; I want the sun and vines of Spain, where at least the peasants have wine and sunshine in aburdance whatever else they may lack !" I should think so, I grimly muttered, remembering that over there the mortar that built up the walls of a town was wet with wine instead of water, and that fields are sometimes moistened with last year's wine when the new is ready. Pilar is right, my friend. There

is no poverty so sordid and awful as that of the cold North. But what could I do? I could not offer her the prospect of change. She was sobbing bitterly now, and I had no words of comfort for her. If only she had not forsaken her principles and her poetry! But the baby may rouse her when it cones. She has not smiled since we left Spain, poor girl. We must wait meanwhile; but, Rameau, it is very cold.'" Poor little woman!" murmured Gaston. "I hardly know which is the worst fortune for her, her transplantation or her marriage with that maundering owl Krowtosky. Krowtosky married to a pretty Spanish poet! Ye gods, it is a cruel jest! There would have been some appropriateness in the laundress or the grisette, but a Spanish girl with arched feet and melancholy eyes! I vow the jade Destiny ought to have her neck wrung for it. Is there a Perseus among us to free this modern unhappy Andromeda ?"

"Poor Krowtosky! he deserves a word too," I modestly ventured to suggest, touched by that little stroke, It is very cold, and his fear of losing his wife. "He is more human than he himself is aware, and we may be sorry for him too."

66 'Ah yes, "assented Rameau, and he dropped an easy sigh. "If he is a bear, he is an honest bear. His next letter was just a note to announce the birth of a little girl and the well being of the mother, which was followed by a more philosophical communication later, as soon as the gracious content of motherhood had fallen upon the young Spaniard. Relieved of his fears, he plunges once again into high speculation, and throws out queer suggestions as to the result of such conflicting elements in parentage as those contributed by Spain and Russia. He has found an occupation of vivid interest,-that of watching the development of his child, which he is convinced will turn out something very curious. Pilar, he adds, has so far recovered her old self as to have written a delicious little poem, which has just appeared in the REVISTA. It is over there, if any of you can read Spanish."

"And the baby is now dead," said Gaston.

Dead, yes, poor mite! It had not time to show what the mingling of Spanish and Russian blood might mean. Krowtosky's letter was most pitiful. That I will not read to you; it affected me too deeply. It was the father there who wrote. Unconscious. ly the little creature had forced a way into his heart, and discovered it a very big and human heart despite his pessimism and philosophy. What hurt him most was the cruel hammering of nails into the baby's coffin, and the sound keeps haunting him through the long wakeful nights. Of the bereaved mother he says little. His mind is fixed on the empty cradle and the small fresh mound in the church-yard, whither he goes every day. I believe myself that it is the first time his heart has ever been stirred by passionate love, and now he speaks of never leaving Thorpfeld, -a place he has been moving heaven and earth to get away from the past six years.

"I promise you, Professor, that I'll never laugh at him again," said Gaston, very gravely. 66 There can be nothing absurd about a man who mourns a little child like that. me his address, and I'll write to him at

once.

66

Give

It may be a distraction for him, and at any rate it will serve to show him that he is remembered in Paris," said Rameau, eager to comply with the request. We thanked the Professor for his story, with some surprise at the lateness of the hour. The door-bell rang, and the appearance of the servant with the evening letters arrested our departure. With a hand_extended to the sobered St. Thomas, Rameau took the letters and glanced as he spoke at the top envelope, deeply edged with black. "Tiens! a letter from poor Krowtosky," he exclaimed. He broke the seal and read aloud : "" My dear friend, I thank you for your kind words in my bereavement. But I am past consolation; I am alone now; my wife is dead, and my heart is broken.' Macmillan's Magazine.