her, if you will give her to me.'

"Madame Angèle laughed at this, but the pleasantry proved a prediction."

Aurore had given her new protectors the titles of Mother Angèle and
Father James, and they in turn called her their daughter. The period of
her residence with them at Plessis appears in her souvenirs as an
ideal interval of happiness and repose, a renewal of the freedom and
_insousiance_ of childhood, with the added knowledge of their value, a
suspension of the terrible demands and interests of life. Would that
this ideal period could be prolonged for women!--but the exigencies
of the race, or perhaps the fears of society, do not permit it.
The two-faced spectre of marriage awaits her, for good or ill. The
_aphelion_ of a woman's liberty is soon reached, the dark organic forces
bind her to tread the narrow orbit of her sex, and if, at the farthest
bound of her individual progress, the attraction could fail, and let her
slip from the eternal circle, chaos would be the result.

Uninvited, therefore, but unrepulsed, Hymen approached our heroine in
the form of Casimir Dudevant, the illegitimate, but acknowledged son and
heir of Colonel Dudevant, an officer of good standing and reasonable
fortune. The only feeling he seems to have inspired in the bosom of his
future wife was one of mild good-will. His only recommendation was a
decent degree of suitableness in outward circumstances. For the true
wants of her nature he had neither fitness nor sympathy; but she did not
know herself then,--she was not yet George Sand. From the stand-point of
her later development, her marriage would seem to us a low one; but we
must remember that she started only from the plane, and not the highest
plane, of French society, in which a marriage of some sort is the
first necessity of a woman's life, and not the crowning point of her