You are doing a good work in bringing your youth and your interests into a house where we are very stupid people and where there is much suffering. But all that ought to tempt you, if you are as much like your mother in mind as you are in person; she was always ready to sacrifice herself for others. I never met any one who resembled her."

"Oh, my mother was a saint!" cried Constance.

"A perfectly lovely saint! What a pity that she married so far away!" continued Mme. de Latour-Ambert, always recurring to herself and thus betraying her egoism. She apparently forgot that it was her own marriage that had sent Marguerite Duranton back to her home in Gascony.

"Your presence, my pet, will cheer up two lonely old people," repeated the baroness.

And Constance answered rather sadly, "I will do my best."

She could not but reflect that at that moment she was not in a state to cheer up any one. Her new friends, on the contrary, seemed to lean on her. The rôles were reversed. Already, as she looked at her godmother, she felt more and more how difficult it would be to treat her with entire confidence.

After a few minutes silence, during which the carriage rolled on rapidly, the baroness continued in a tone of authority:

"It is very important for you, at your age, to see a little of the world. You might otherwise, for want of experience, take one of those resolutions which people repent to the end of their lives. Marriage is a very serious problem."

Constance blushed and silently thought that she should never marry.

"It is a lottery, they say," went on Mme. de Latour-Ambert. "Maybe it is a lottery, but still one must not take VOL. I. 44

LIVING AGE.

chances in it without good knowledge beforehand."

She sighed, and Constance understood the sigh when a few minutes later she was presented to the baron. He was a very decrepit old man, who never could be, however, what we call venerable. Yet in spite of his being small and bent with infirmity, he still kept what Mlle. de Vardes had once been pleased to call his "grand air." No one can tell what gives it, and it can never be imitated. Doubled up as he was in his easy-chair, with one side partially paralyzed, M. de Latour-Ambert still retained something of this distinction. Unfortunately it was not sufficient to compensate those around him for his irritability and for the sarcasms with which he liked to season his least remark, generally dictated by bad temper.

He rose when his wife, entering the salon where he was sitting half asleep, announced Constance Vidal in a loud voice, for he was very deaf; and his manner of regarding the young girl was that of a connoisseur absolutely satisfied. He muttered "Charming!" between his toothless gums, and kissed her ungloved hand. Constance had never been saluted in that fashion. But everything was alike new to her in her godmother's household, although, clever as she was and ready to assimilate things new to her, she did not allow herself to show a particle of surprise.

In the appartement which the De Latour-Amberts occupied, the ground floor or rez-de-chaussée of a very handsome house which stood back, as the term is, entre cour et jardin, everything showed faithful adherence to the régime of the past. One could see grouped in an almost tragic fashion about this old man who had once played an important part in the political world, spectres of the past; the Emperor Napoleon III, as Flandrin

had the intelligence to see and comprehend him, rendering so well the strange seductiveness of his half closed eyes; the Empress seated among her ladies like Calypso among her nymphs-two excellent copies of the original pictures; then the bust of a boy, the Prince Imperial, whose sweet expression made the horror of his destiny the greater by contrast; and scattered about everywhere, on the tables and the consoles, were photographs of former friends, most of them dead, who had been personages of distinction under the Second Empire. A glass case held the decorations of a rumber of foreign orders and the snuffboxes enriched with diamonds which had been given to M. de Latour-Ambert by foreign sovereigns when he was an ambassador.

Constance heard names connected with the wars in Italy and the Crimea; she saw on the very day of her arrival an illustrious marshal who had won fame in those wars, walking alive in the very salon which seemed to her so funereal, so much like a necropolis. Her youthful mind was much impressed by these relics of a time which though not remote had so wholly passed away; they seemed like a mute protestation against the present, which contrasted with them even in least details.

She noticed several things in the course of that first day. Mme. de Latour-Ambert never seemed to have her husband off her mind. She made herself hoarse reading aloud the news. papers to him, for this was, he said, his greatest diversion, though it was hard to understand what pleasure he could derive from what was continually putting him in a rage. He would burst into fits of anger and shout out his disapprobation, which gave the reader time to take breath, and she would keep on with her wearisome task even until the irascible baron fell

asleep. When he awoke he always found her ready to accompany him for a drive, or to play piquet with him, which she did several times a day.

Mme. de Latour-Ambert strictly acquitted herself of all these duties, fulfilling them even scrupulously, but no spontaneous feeling seemed to prompt her. Her solicitude betrayed no tenderness or real affection. She had always been toward her husband as she was now, and as we only receive what we give in such companionship, the ascendancy she exercised over him was purely intellectual. The weakened intellect of M. de Latour-Ambert was no longer fit to receive suggestions from his wife, and there evidently was no reciprocity of affection between them. Possibly their union had never deserved the name of marriage; there are too many cases of the kind!

The old ambassador, now past seventy, who had suddenly lost by a revolution all that had given him prestige, found himself reduced without compensation to the rôle of an invalid, and the downfall of his own hopes had entailed those of his ambitious wife, who could not entirely pardon him for having fallen from his high social rank. Still in the prime of life, she found herself linked by her own fault to a cadavre; she could not, to console herself when evil days came, recall, as could other women, the happier days of youth shared with her husband. With firmness, but without resignation, she dragged the chain which seemed likely before long to break.

Perhaps on his own part the baron vaguely perceived, through the mists of his now clouded brain, the secret feelings of his wife, and was little grateful to her for the icy punctuality with which she waited upon him.

Constance, too frank to understand at once the slow-moving tragedy of which this household, outwardly so peaceful and correct, was the theatre,

still had keenness enough to see that her mother had been much mistaken in Mlle. de Vardes, unless, indeed, twenty or twenty-five years had been able to effect one of those surprising transformations which make people unrecognizable. But how could Constance explain the difference between the real baroness and her letters? She did not understand that there are women who excel in correspondence, who take delight in it, and who in writing letters are constructing that species of romance in which the author is reflected, not as he is, but as he would wish to be, as if he disposed of the riches of Aladdin's cave more recklessly according as he was more miserable.

When Constance found herself alone that night in her little chamber, which opened out of that of her godmother, she felt like some poor frightened bird who, battered by the tempest, has sought refuge in a cage and is there held captive. Yet her hosts were anxious to provide her with pleasures. Mme. de Latour-Ambert came in and sat on the foot of her bed, and formed many plans for her amusement, promising to show her, without losing any time, all that was worth seeing in Paris at that season.

"However," she said, with one of those nods which showed her to be fully determined on a certain thing, "I am not going to give you up now that you have been allowed to come. I shall fancy that I have a daughter of my own, a daughter who, to complete my happiness, is like my friend."

Thereupon she asked Constance many questions as to what she could remember of her mother. At every answer she exclaimed:

"Ah, that was just like her!-To the very last she took all things au sérieux; a happy woman she was indeed! Poor dear Marguerite-things of earth

could not hinder her from living in the blue of heaven, and from trying to draw down the stars from the skies— The realities of life were nought to her; she deemed that trials borne with Christian faith exalt rather than depress the upward flight of the soul." Again Mme. de Latour-Ambert sighed and seemed to reflect.

"It is she who has chosen the better part."

Then, after another silence, she added,

"Children!-to have children!-that must be heaven!"

These last words were pronounced with an accent of passion and envy. Then changing her tone she began to question Constance about her father, with whom she evidently had no sympathy-the hostility between them was reciprocal-and to ask about the country life, the occupations of the two and their mutual relations with their neighbors.

Without any deliberate purpose Constance shrank from any mention of M. de Glynne.

"I see you had very few resources. You are a real little wild girl of the woods," said the baroness, smiling and smoothing caressingly the long dark tresses of the girl, which lay unconfined upon the pillow. "We shall get on nicely together. Our first visit shall be to a dressmaker, the second to the Salon, which will close in a couple of days, and to-morrow is the night at the opera. I am sure you love music? But if you only dared to say so, I am sure that you would like best of all, after a night spent in a railway carriage, to go to sleep."

And indeed the eyes of Constance had already closed, and in happy dreams she was far away from her godmother, and at the Park, the name of which she murmured as she dropped asleep.

After the "Sorrows of Satan," Mr. Hall Caine. We lay down the literature of female hysteria to take up that of emotional monasticism, with John Storm as guide and example. It is common knowledge that Mr. Caine never was a monk; and the probabilities are against his having sojourned in a religious house or studied the ways of "the Holy Gethsemane" from within its cloister. Of the four vows of poverty, chastity, obedience, and stability, the Manx novelist can have learned only by hearsay, not by experience. And his singularly robust, and very Saxon or, at any rate, insular philosophy of life is not such as to fit him for the abstruse inward contemplation failing which a story-teller that discourses of monks and monasticism will overlook the chief point. Mr. Hall Caine has an eye for what he sees, but he moves in a world of his own. He is dramatic, epic, and a lover of strong effects set in glaring lights-a showman with a gift of powerful language, grim and stark, and a drum on which he beats pretty loudly. There is no grace in his drawing; and though he can feel, he seldom persuades the heart. He ploughs and harrows it, if you like, but does not melt and subdue it. His figures are weather-beaten, rudely carved in rock, huge, and sometimes grotesque. And while the men fling themselves into violent action, which is their element, the women, after faint or spasmodic attempts at a graceful coquetry, lose all distinctive notes and as good justify what Pope said of them,

some

as

1. A Romance of Two Worlds. And other Works. By Marie Corelli. London, 1896-1897.

2. The Christian. By Hall Caine, London, 1897.

for they seem to have no character at all.

But Mr. Caine lives and dies by emotion. Though in his most ambitious work, "The Bondman," and in its hero, Red Jason, he undertakes to renew the Norse Saga, what we get from the turning of his wheel is not that, but something else—a romance à la Victor Hugo, grandiose, overpowering and sentimental. The passion of pity therein set before us with many heartshaking sobs was never the mood of Bearsarks and Vikings; it is Christian, but degenerate, tending always to the excess which makes of a virtue mere instinct, without choice or self-control. The extreme of that feeling which, seventy or eighty years ago, took as much from the French poet in good sense as it added to him in eloquence, may be seen with uneasy admiration at the close of the century in Tolstoy. It has mastered the man whom it should inspire. And, like all extravagance, it breaks down the hedge of the law. Thus, when we look carefully into that kindred study. "The Manxman," of which Red Jason is still, in effect, the hero, we cannot but feel, in spite of its pathos, which is often great and sometimes unsophisticated, that the moral is absolutely the same as George Sand's, at the time she was writing "Jacques" and "Valentine." Mr. Caine has never drawn a character equal in lively and almost humorous touches to this hapless "Pete." But Pete is merely Jacques transplanted to the Isle of Man, without education, yet full of the modern sentiment which compels the French officer to commit suicide that his wife may take up with her cavalier' servente,

and which robs Pete of house and home, wife and child, and sends him into the outer darkness, a martyr to love, but an accomplice in violation of legal duty. Either no moral is meant, or it is antinomian. Now, is there one of Mr. Caine's stories that does not end like this, in the apotheosis of feeling?

John Storm, the struggling Christian hero, is a complex but hardly intelligible character, made in several pieces which no art has fused or run into a mould. As we follow his irregular movements we are reminded now of Charles Kingsley, and again of Claude Frollo, never of any monk that we know from history. The picture intended is that of the religious condition of England, but especially of the Christian Socialist who sets himself to change and transfigure it. He is a clergyman, well read in the Fathers, travelled, and not wanting in experience one that has gone below the surface in Sydney, Melbourne, London; consecrated by vocation, and afterwards by vow, to the task of living the Gospel, not merely of preaching it. And every step in his career is determined by a woman whom he attempts to strangle for her soul's sake, but at last marries in spite of his vows of chastity and stability, the Father Superior who has taken his monastic oaths now blessing his matrimonial. As the Manxman divorced his wife that she might be free to wed her paramour, so John Storm gives a bill of separation to his convent and takes Glory in exchange;-from which the inference would seem to be that love laughs at vows, wherever made, and that marriage and monasticism are alike ineffective, and ought to be so, when passion is strong. "We were but man and woman," says the dying Prophet, "and we could not help but love each other, though it was a fault, and for one of us it was a sin. And

God will forgive us, because He made us so, and because God is the God of love." These tender words are quite in the style of George Sand. They suit the conditions of Philip and Kate—an adulterous couple-in "The Manxman," at least as well as they suit John Storm and his Glory Quayle. And they breathe a breath which comes, as Mr. Hall Caine acknowledges in another place, from Paphos rather than from Sinai or Galilee.

Given this clue, we can wind our way in and out of the maze. Like Abu Ganem in the Arabian tale, Mr. Storm is "the slave of love." And Miss Quayle is the slave of pleasure. How shall these two, aided by the monastery and the music-hall, resolve that tremendous question of the Gospel in London? They do not resolve it. The curtain falls on their wedding, and the question lies where it was. To the woman it did not signify. She never wanted but to marry John Storm, and she did marry him. But this feminine answer to all possible conundrums will hardly atone for the confusion of types, and the chaos of "creed and culture," to which we are left at the end of the book, although we had hoped to arrive at something definite, and were promised it in the beginning. There was a rare opportunity for the master, had a master come that way. Christian Socialists, working clergymen, models of philanthropy, and even monks and friars, are extant, if one cares to look at them in action. The fallen woman, the degenerate man, may be studied, like any other specimens, in their habitat, and their causes and conditions searched out with philosophic eyes. The relations of Christianity to modern life present a theme as vast as it is obscure and formidable. London itself calls for a painter of morals and manners, who should combine the picturesque of Charles Dickens with Balzac's depth