at times, in the single case of Mme. de Sevigne, all three--far more
sensitive than the rest of the world--were yet not sensitive enough to
feel equally the less sharp communication of joy. They claimed, owned,
and felt sensibly the pangs and not the pleasures of the absent. Or if
not only the pangs, at least they were apprehensive chiefly in that sense
which human anxiety and foreboding have lent to the word; they were
apprehensive of what they feared. "Are you warm?" writes Marceline
Valmore to her child. "You have so little to wear--are you really warm?
Oh, take care of me--cover me well." Elsewhere she says, "You are an
insolent child to think of work. Nurse your health, and mine. Let us
live like fools"; whereby she meant that she should work with her own
fervent brain for both, and take the while her rest in Ondine. If this
living and unshortened love was sad, it must be owned that so, too, was
the story. Eugenie and Maurice de Guerin were both to die soon, and
Marceline was to lose this daughter and another.

But set free from the condition and occasion of pain and sorrow, this
life without boundaries which mothers have undergone seems to suggest and
to portend what the progressive charity of generations may be--and is, in
fact, though the continuity does not always appear--in the course of the
world. If a love and life without boundaries go down from a mother into
her child, and from that child into her children again, then
incalculable, intricate, universal, and eternal are the unions that
seem--and only seem--so to transcend the usual experience. The love of
such a mother passes unchanged out of her own sight. It drops down ages,
but why should it alter? What in her daughter should she make so much
her own as that daughter's love for her daughter in turn? There are no
lapses.

Marceline Valmore, married to an actor who seems to have "created the