warmth of his affections; but it was not within the range of her
experience, confined much to Parisian life, nor in harmony with her
notions of the frigidity and morgue of the English national character,
that a rich and high-born young man, to whom a great career in practical
public life was predicted, should form a matrimonial alliance with a
foreign orphan girl, who, if of gentle birth, had no useful connections,
would bring no correspondent dot, and had been reared and intended for
the profession of the stage. She much more feared that the result of any
attentions on the part of such a man would be rather calculated to
compromise the orphan's name, or at least to mislead her expectations,
than to secure her the shelter of a wedded home. Moreover, she had
cherished plans of her own for Isaura's future. Madame Savarin had
conceived for Gustave Rameau a friendly regard, stronger than that which
Mrs. Morley entertained for Graham Vane, for it was more motherly.
Gustave had been familiarized to her sight and her thoughts since he had
first been launched into the literary world under her husband's auspices;
he had confided to her his mortification in his failures, his joy in his
successes. His beautiful countenance, his delicate health, his very
infirmities and defects, had endeared him to her womanly heart. Isaura
was the wife of all others who, in Madame Savarin's opinion, was made for
Rameau. Her fortune, so trivial beside the wealth of the Englishman,
would be a competence to Rameau; then that competence might swell into
vast riches if Isaura succeeded on the stage. She found with extreme
displeasure that Isaura's mind had become estranged from the profession
to which she had been destined, and divined that a deference to the
Englishman's prejudices had something to do with that estrangement. It
was not to be expected that a Frenchwoman, wife to a sprightly man of
letters, who had intimate friends and allies in every department of the
artistic world, should cherish any prejudice whatever against the
exercise of an art in which success achieved riches and renown; but she