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Updated: June 24, 2025
To "rank himself with princes" had been the intense meaning of his life since ragged and fiercely imaginative childhood. Odd circumstances had ranked him with Sophie Zobraska. The mere romance of it had carried him off his feet. She was a princess. She was charming. She frankly liked his society. She seemed interested in his adventurous career. She was romantic. He too. She was his Egeria.
I was not on a stage, but in a room, holding actual and rapt communion with my spirit-bride, Egeria!... "Egeria! Egeria!" I sobbed ... and tears streamed down my face. I was miserable, without her, in the flesh ... though she was there, beside me, in soul! I was aware of the audience again. I was proud and strong in my confidence now. The tittering had stopped. The house was filling with awe.
Here, like the good Numa, he reposed from the toils of state, taking lessons in government, not from the nymph Egeria, but from the honored wife of his bosom, who was one of that class of females, sent upon the earth a little after the flood, as a punishment for the sins of mankind, and commonly known by the appellation of knowing women.
I shall be a Deputy; and I shall make no blunders, for I shall consult my Egeria. Every great politician, from Numa to our present Prime Minister, has had his Sibyl of the fountain. A score of deputies visit Valerie; she is acquiring considerable influence; and now that she is about to be established in a charming house, with a carriage, she will be one of the occult rulers of Paris.
But De Montaigne's letters to Maltravers consoled him for the loss of less congenial friends. The Frenchman was now an eminent and celebrated man; and his appreciation of Maltravers was sweeter to the latter than would have been the huzzas of crowds. But, all this while, his vanity was pleased and his curiosity roused by the continued correspondence of his unseen Egeria.
Evidently this girl had become as much public property as if she had gone on the stage. The nymph, hallowed to him by secret devotion, was vulgarized by the noisy hands of the mob, and by the popular voices, which said, "We know more about Egeria than you do."
What are we to infer from this? The English rustic ideal is realisable by each individual rustic child. But so is the human ideal in Utopia. But what of the children who do not belong to Utopia? What would have happened to the Utopian children if there had been no Egeria to lead them into the path of self-realisation?
Numa had eleven other shields like it made and hung in the temple of Mars, and, yearly, a set of men dedicated to the office bore them through the city with songs and dances. Just as all warlike customs were said to have been invented by Romulus, all peaceful and religious ones were held to have sprung from Numa and his Egeria.
Thus, false to his nation, yet true to the new Egeria of his thoughts and actions traitor to the requirements of vengeance and war, yet faithful to the interests of tranquility and love did he seek, night after night, Antonina's presence. His passion, though it denied him to his warrior duties, wrought not deteriorating change in his disposition. All that it altered in him it altered nobly.
His face brightened as he read, and he laid it down with a broad smile and helped himself to fish. "Are you people very particular what you do to-day?" he asked. Arthur said, No. George explained that he was in the hands of his beneficent friend. "Because my Aunt Egeria down at Glenavelin has got up some sort of a picnic on the moors, and she wants us to meet her at the sheepfolds about twelve."
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