she would be perfectly happy. The discovery of this deeply irritated her grandmother, who at length was provoked to intimate to the girl something of the real motive for insisting on this separation—namely, that her mother's antecedents were such as, in the eyes of Aurore's well-wishers, rendered it desirable to establish the daughter's existence apart from that of her parent. Sooner or later such a revelation must have been made; but made as it was, thus precipitately, in a moment of jealous anger, the chief result was of necessity to cause a painful and dangerous shock to the sensitive young mind. It brought about an unnatural discord in her moral nature, forbidden all at once to respect what she had loved most, and must continue to love, in spite of all. On the injurious effects of the over-agitation to which she was subjected in her childhood she has laid much stress in her remarkable work, "The Story of My Life." Much of this book, written when she was between forty and fifty, reads like a romance; and had a certain amount of retrospective imagination entered into the treatment of these reminiscences it would not be surprising. The tendency to impart poetical colour and significance to whatever was capable of taking it was her mastering impulse, and may sometimes have led her to lose the distinction between fancy and reality, especially as by her own confession her memory was never her strong point. But she had an excellent memory for impres-
