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Rh enchanted Manon's benevolent heart. In her protestations of being free from all passion, one cannot help feeling the vibrations of a nature that had never yet sounded its own depths—that was ready to pledge itself to, it knew not what, in the very ecstasy of self-sacrifice.

But the girl's dream was not destined to be carried into practice. Either M. de Sévelinges did not understand her, or she did not understand him, and they both expressed themselves in such very guarded, delicate, and ambiguous terms, that they wrote apparently quite at cross-purposes. For, as these wavering seniors frequently do, he seems to have backed out of the negotiation, and Manon's last word to Sophie was, that she hardly knew whether to be offended or not, but ended with a hearty laugh.

To enumerate the many other suitors who came forward one after another to propose for Mademoiselle Phlipon would sound too like the fairy tale of the proud king's daughter, who used to have the claimants to her hand marshalled before her in a row, and refuse them in turn by pronouncing one to be as thin as a pole, another as fat as a barrel, and a third bearded like a goat, till her enraged sire declared that the first vagrant who came begging alms at his gates should have her, whether or no. M. Phlipon at one moment behaved not unlike this incensed monarch. Seeing that a "martial young Apollo," a thriving Greffier des Bâtiments, and a certain M. Coquin, a round-faced, beaming young man, "a good paste of a husband," young and wealthy, if not wise, had all been rejected in turn, he was actually for marrying her to a man who, as she was entering her door, met her casually, and asked whether she could direct him