Purple eBooks

Perhaps you remember
her?--fat, thick lips, and crooked teeth. Natalie D---- said to
me, "Have you ever been in love, Prince?" HAVE I, MAMAN? I did
not know what answer to make. What is love? How does one feel,
when one has it? They laugh at it here, and of course I should not
wish to do what is laughable. Give me a hint: forewarned is
forearmed, you know,"--etc., etc.
Perhaps the Princess Martha DID suspect something; perhaps some
word in her son's letter touched a secret spot far back in her
memory, and renewed a dim, if not very intelligible, pain. She
answered his question at length, in the style of the popular French
romances of that day. She had much to say of dew and roses,
turtledoves and the arrows of Cupid.
"Ask thyself," she wrote, "whether felicity comes with her
presence, and distraction with her absence,--whether her eyes make
the morning brighter for thee, and her tears fall upon thy heart
like molten lava,--whether heaven would be black and dismal without
her company, and the flames of hell turn into roses under her
feet.


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