Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/294

283 leaves have oblique lines like the oblique ribs of the leaves.

Thus, then, I think, we see reasons for many at any rate of the variations of color and markings in caterpillars, which at first sight seem so fantastic and inexplicable. I should, however, produce an impression very different from that which I wish to convey, were I to lead you to suppose that all these varieties have been explained or are understood. Far from it, they still offer a large field for study; nevertheless, I venture to think the evidence now brought forward, however imperfectly, is at least sufficient to justify the conclusion that there is not a hair or a line, not a spot or a color, for which there is not a reason, which has not a purpose or a meaning in the economy of nature.

is in legal phrase the "highest consideration;" even the cold and unromantic eye of the law perceives that the fact of a woman giving herself up, body and soul, to a man, is more than an equivalent for any sort of marriage settlement. But at no period of the world's history was it ever contemplated that a woman's immediate duty, on becoming a wife, was forthwith to efface her own individuality. Now this was what Lady Sylvia deliberately set about doing, in the first flush of her wifely devotion. As she had married the very source and fountainhead of all earthly wisdom, what use was there in her retaining opinions of her own? Henceforth she was to have always at her side the lawgiver, the arbiter, the infallible authority; she would surrender to his keeping all her beliefs just as she implicitly surrendered her trunks. She never thought twice about her new dresses: what railway-guard could withstand that terrible, commanding eye?

Now, little has been said to the point in these pages about Balfour, if it has not been shown that he was a man of violent prejudices. Perhaps he was not unlike other people in that respect; except in so far as he took little pains to conceal his opinions. But if there was anything likely to cure him of prejudices it was to see them mimicked in the faithful and loving mirror now always by his side; for how could he help laughing at the unintentional distortions? He had been a bitter opponent of the Second Empire, while that bubble still glittered in the political atmosphere; but surely that was no reason why Lady Sylvia should positively refuse to remain in Paris?

"Gracious goodness," said he, "have you acquired a personal dislike for thirty millions of people? You may take my word for it, Sylvia, that as all you are likely to know about the French is by travelling among them, they are the nicest people in the world, so far as that goes. Look at the courtesy of the officials—look at the trouble a working-man or a peasant, will take to put you in the right road. Believe me, you may go further and fare worse. Wait, for example, till you make your first plunge into Germany. Wait till you see the Germans on board a Rhine steamer—their manners to strangers, their habits of eating"

"And then?" she said, "am I to form my opinion of the Germans from that? Do foreigners form their opinion of England by looking at a steamer-load of people going to Margate?"

"Sylvia," said he, "I command you to love the French."

"I won't," she said.

But this defiant disobedience was only the curious result of a surrender of her own opinions. She was prepared to dislike thirty millions of human beings merely because he had expressed detestation of Louis Napoleon. And when he ended the argument with a laugh, the laugh was not altogether against her. From that moment he determined to seize every opportunity of pointing out to her the virtues of the French.

Of course it was very delightful to him to have for his companion one who came quite fresh to all those wonders of travel which lie close around our own door. One does not often meet nowadays with a young lady who has not seen, for example, the Rhine under moonlight. Lady Sylvia had never been out of England. It seemed to her that she had crossed interminable distances, and left her native country in a different planet altogether, when she reached Brussels, and she could not understand her husband when he said that in the Rue Montague de la Cour he had always the impression that he had just