Has the green-eyed monster already invaded your gentle soul because he doesn't show you his own letters? My dear, no man who was not born a our would show a woman's letters to his wife. Surely you wish your hero to know the A, B, C of gentle manners! I am delighted you are going into the world; but if you only go as "a duty" I am afraid the results won't be sunshiny. "Duty" is such a very disagreeable thing. It always rolls itself up like a hedgehog, with all its prickles out, turning forever round and round on the axle of its own self-admiration. If you go to Trouville, and wherever else you do go, en martyr, my dear, you will give the mischievous duchess, if she be mischievous, a terrible advantage over you at starting. If you mean to be silent, unpleasant, and enwrapped in a gloomy contemplation of your own merits and wrongs, don't blame him if he spend his time at the Casino with his friend, or somebody worse. I am quite sure you mean to be unselfish, and you fancy you are so, and all the rest of it, quite honestly; but, in real truth, as I told you before, you are only an egotist. You would rather keep this unhappy Piero on thorns beside you than see him enjoy himself with other people. Now, I call that shockingly selfish; and if you go in that spirit to Trouville he will soon begin to wish, my dear child, that he had never had a fancy to come over to a London season. I can see you so exactly! Too dignified to be cross, too offended to be companionable; silent, reproachful, terrible!

From the Lady Mary Bruton, Roches Noires, Trouville, to Mrs. D'Arcy, British Embassy, Berlin.

July 15th.

… Among the new arrivals here are the San Zenone. You remember my telling you of their marriage some six weeks ago. It was quite the marriage of the season. They really were immensely in love with each other, but that stupid month down in the country has done its usual work. In a rainy June, too! Of course any poor Amorina would emerge from his captivity bedraggled, dripping, and disenchanted. She is really very pretty,—quite lovely, indeed,—but she looks fretful and dull; her handsome husband, on the contrary, is as gay as a lark which has found the door of its cage wide open one morning. There is here a great friend of his, a Duchessa dell'Aquila Fulva. She is very gay too; she is always perfectly dressed, and chattering from morning to night in shrill Italian or voluble French. She is the cynosure of all eyes as she goes to swim in a rose-colored maillot, with an orange-and-gold Eastern burnous flung about her artistically. She has that wonderful Venetian coloring which can stand a contrast and glow of color which would simply kill any other woman. She is very tall, and magnificently made, and yet uncommonly graceful. Last night she was persuaded to dance a salterello with San Zenone at the Maison Persane, and it was marvellous. They are both such handsome people, and threw such wonderful brio, as they would call it, into the affair. The poor little, pretty princess, looking as fair and as dull as a primrose in a shower, sat looking on dismally. Stupid little thing!—as if that would do her any good! A few days ago Lord Hampshire arrived off here in his yacht. He was present at the salterello, and as I saw him out in the gardens afterwards with the neglected one, sitting beside her in the moonlight, I presume he was offering her sympathy and consolation. He is a heavy young fellow, but exceedingly good-humored and kind-hearted. He would have been in heaven in the wet June at Coombe-Bysset; but she refused him, silly little thing! I am quite angry with her: she has had her own way, and she won't make the best of that. I met her and her rejected admirer riding together this morning towards Villerville, while the beautiful prince was splashing about in the water with his Venetian friend. I see a great many eventual complications ahead. Well, they will all be the fault of that Rainy June!