Isaura laughed her pleasant silvery laugh. "I should admire the
frankness of that boast, Monsieur, if in our talk just now you had not
spoken as contemptuously of what we are accustomed to consider French
masterpieces as you have done of Virgil and Tasso."

"Ah, Mademoiselle! it is not my fault if you have had teachers of taste
so _rococo_ as to bid you find masterpieces in the tiresome stilted
tragedies of Corneille and Racine. Poetry of a court, not of a people,
one simple novel, one simple stanza that probes the hidden recesses of
the human heart, reveals the sores of this wretched social state,
denounces the evils of superstition, kingcraft, and priestcraft, is worth
a library of the rubbish which pedagogues call 'the classics.' We agree,
at least, in one thing, Mademoiselle; we both do homage to the genius of
your friend Madame de Grantmesnil."

"Your friend, Signorina!" cried Graham, incredulously; "is Madame de
Grantmesnil your friend?"

"The dearest I have in the world."

Graham's face darkened; he turned away in silence, and in another minute
vanished from the room, persuading himself that he felt not one pang of
jealousy in leaving Gustave Rameau by the side of Isaura. "Her dearest
friend Madame de Grantmesnil!" he muttered.

A word now on Isaura's chief correspondent. Madame de Grantmesnil was a
woman of noble birth and ample fortune. She had separated from her
husband in the second year after marriage. She was a singularly eloquent
writer, surpassed among contemporaries of her sex in popularity and