death, Isaura, in the innocent age between childhood and youth, had been
left the most sorrowful and most lonely creature on the face of the
earth, this famous woman, worshipped by the rich for her intellect,
adored by the poor for her beneficence, came to the orphan's friendless
side, breathing love once more into her pining heart, and waking for the
first time the desires of genius, the aspirations of art, in the dim
self-consciousness of a soul between sleep and waking.

But, my dear Englishman, put yourself in Graham's place, and suppose that
you were beginning to fall in love with a girl whom for many good reasons
you ought not to marry; suppose that in the same hour in which you were
angrily conscious of jealousy on account of a man whom it wounds your
self-esteem to consider a rival, the girl tells you that her dearest
friend is a woman who is famed for her hostility to the institution of
marriage!




CHAPTER IV.

On the same day in which Graham dined with the Savarins, M. Louvier
assembled round his table the elite of the young Parisians who
constituted the oligarchy of fashion, to meet whom he had invited his new
friend the Marquis de Rochebriant. Most of them belonged to the
Legitimist party, the noblesse of the faubourg; those who did not,
belonged to no political party at all,--indifferent to the cares of
mortal States as the gods of Epicurus. Foremost among this _Jeunesse
doree_ were Alain's kinsmen, Raoul and Enguerrand de Vandemar. To these
Louvier introduced him with a burly parental bonhomie, as if he were the