salon. What salon more brilliant than that which he and Isaura united
could command? He had long conquered his early impulse of envy at
Isaura's success,--in fact that success had become associated with his
own, and had contributed greatly to his enrichment. So that to other
motives of love he might add the prudential one of interest. Rameau well
knew that his own vein of composition, however lauded by the cliques, and
however unrivalled in his own eyes, was not one that brings much profit
in the market. He compared himself to those poets who are too far in
advance of their time to be quite as sure of bread and cheese as they are
of immortal fame.

But he regarded Isaura's genius as of a lower order, and a thing in
itself very marketable. Marry her, and the bread and cheese were so
certain that he might elaborate as slowly as he pleased the verses
destined to immortal fame. Then he should be independent of inferior
creatures like Victor de Mauleon. But while Rameau convinced himself
that he was passionately in love with Isaura, he could not satisfy
himself that she was in love with him.

Though during the past year they had seen each other constantly, and
their literary occupations had produced many sympathies between them--
though he had intimated that many of his most eloquent love-poems were
inspired by her--though he had asserted in prose, very pretty prose too,
that she was all that youthful poets dream of,--yet she had hitherto
treated such declarations with a playful laugh, accepting them as elegant
compliments inspired by Parisian gallantry; and he felt an angry and sore
foreboding that if he were to insist too seriously on the earnestness of
their import and ask her plainly to be his wife, her refusal would be
certain, and his visits to her house might be interdicted.