For a busy man like Canalis, an adventure of this kind is swept away like a harebell by a mountain torrent, but in the more unoccupied life of the young secretary, this charming girl, whom his imagination persistently connected with the blonde beauty at the window, fastened upon his heart, and did as much mischief in his regulated life as a fox in a poultry-yard.

La Briere allowed himself to be preoccupied by this mysterious correspondent; and he answered her last letter with another, a pretentious and carefully studied epistle, in which, however, passion begins to reveal itself through pique.
Mademoiselle,--Is it quite loyal in you to enthrone yourself in the heart of a poor poet with a latent intention of abandoning him if he is not exactly what you wish, leaving him to endless regrets,--showing him for a moment an image of perfection, were it only assumed, and at any rate giving him a foretaste of happiness?
I was very short-sighted in soliciting this letter, in which you have begun to unfold the elegant fabric of your thoughts.

A man can easily become enamored with a mysterious unknown who combines such fearlessness with such originality, so much imagination with so much feeling.

Who would not wish to know you after reading your first confidence?
It requires a strong effort on my part to retain my senses in thinking of you, for you combine all that can trouble the head or the heart of man.

I therefore make the most of the little self-possession you have left me to offer you my humble remonstrances.
Do you really believe, mademoiselle, that letters, more or less true in relation to the life of the writers, more or less insincere,--for those which we write to each other are the expressions of the moment at which we pen them, and not of the general tenor of our lives,--do you believe, I say, that beautiful as they may be, they can at all replace the representation that we could make of ourselves to each other by the revelations of daily intercourse?
Man is dual.