She received one day a letter from her father, which contained the following words:
"My good Child,
"Your letters, my dear child, give me and your sisters great pleasure; not merely on account of the lively things which they contain, but more especially on account of your way of bearing that which is anything but lively. Continue to do thus, my child, and you—my heart rejoices in the thought—will advance on the way to wisdom and happiness, and you will have joyfully to acknowledge the blessed truth which the history of great things, as well as of small, establishes, that there is nothing evil which may not be made conducive to good; and thus our own errors may be made steps on our way to improvement.
"Greet your sisters cordially from their and your tenderly devoted
"Father."
Petrea kissed these lines with tears of grateful joy. She wore them for several days near her heart; she preserved them through her whole life as one of the endeared means by which she had gone happily through the chromatic scale of existence.
Louise was joked much about Cousin Thure; Cousin Thure was joked much about Louise; it pleased him very much to be joked about her, to be told that Oestanvik wanted a mistress, that he himself wanted a pretty wife, and that without doubt Louise Frank was one of the most sensible as well as one of the prettiest girls in the country; and more than this, was besides of such a respectable family! The Landed-proprietor received already felicitations on his betrothal.
What the bride-elect, however, thought on the matter was more difficult to fathom. She was certainly always polite to Cousin Thure; still this politeness seemed expressive rather of indifference than friendship; and she declined, with a decision amazing to many people, his pressing and often repeated solicitations to make an excursion to Oestanvik in his new landau, drawn by what he styled "his foxes—his four horses in one rein." Many people asserted that the agreeable and cordial Jacobi was much nearer to Louise's heart than the rich Landed-proprietor! but even towards Jacobi her conduct was so equal, so tranquil, so unconstrained, that nobody could exactly tell how it might be. Nobody knew so well as we do, that Louise considered it consistent with the dignity of woman to show only perfect indifference to the attentions or doux-propos of men, until they had been openly and fully declared. Louise despised coquetry so far as to dread anything which bordered on the very limits of it. Her young female friends joked with her upon her strict notions on this head, and fancied that she would remain unmarried.
"That may be," said Louise, calmly.
They told her one day of a gentleman who said "I will not stand up before any girl who is not some little of a coquette."