Page:George Sand by Bertha Thomas.djvu/75

Rh that we find her complaining in the letter last quoted that her work makes no progress; but the lost time was made up for by redoubled industry during her summer visit to Nohant.

In the autumn appeared Valentine. This second novel not only confirmed the triumph won by the first, but was a surer proof of the writer's calibre, as showing what she could do with simpler materials. Here, encouraged by success, she had ventured to take her stand entirely on her own ground—dispensing even with an incidental trip to the tropics, which, in Indiana, strikes as a misplaced concession to the prevalent craze for Oriental colouring—and to lay the scene in her own obscure province of Berry, her first descriptions of which show her rare comprehension of the poetry of landscape. Like Indiana, Valentine is a story of the affections; like Indiana, it is a domestic tragedy, of which the girl-heroine is the victim of a pernicious system that makes of marriage, in the first instance, a mere commercial speculation. Indeed, the extreme painfulness of the story would render the whole too repulsive but for the charm of the setting, which relieves it not a little, and a good deal of humour in the treatment of the minor characters, notably the eighteenth century marquise, and the Lhéry family of peasant-parvenus. The personages are drawn with more finish than those in Indiana; the tone is more natural in its pitch. It is the work of one who finds in every-day