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.