ur, you do not love us."

Then Pascal, filled with an overwhelming sadness, gave up the contest.
His remorse increased for having shown so much tolerance, for not having
exercised his authority as master, in directing Clotilde's education
and bringing up. In his belief that trees grew straight if they were
not interfered with, he had allowed her to grow up in her own way, after
teaching her merely to read and write. It was without any preconceived
plan, while aiding him in making his researches and correcting his
manuscripts, and simply by the force of circumstances, that she had
read everything and acquired a fondness for the natural sciences. How
bitterly he now regretted his indifference! What a powerful impulse he
might have given to this clear mind, so eager for knowledge, instead
of allowing it to go astray, and waste itself in that desire for the
Beyond, which Grandmother Felicite and the good Martine favored. While
he had occupied himself with facts, endeavoring to keep from going
beyond the phenomenon, and succeeding in doing so, through his
scientific discipline, he had seen her give all her thoughts to the
unknown, the mysterious. It was with her an obsession, an instinctive
curiosity which amounted to torture when she could not satisfy it. There
was in her a longing which nothing could appease, an irresistible call
toward the unattainable, the unknowable. Even when she was a child, and
still more, later, when she grew up, she went straight to the why and
the how of things, she demanded ultimate causes. If he showed her a
flower, she asked why this flower produced a seed, why this seed would
germinate. Then, it would be the mystery of birth and death, and the
unknown forces, and God, and all things. In half a dozen questions she
would drive him into a corner, obliging him each time to acknowledge his
fatal ignorance; and when he no longer knew what to answer her, when he
would get rid of her with a gesture of comic fury, she would give a gay
laugh of triumph, and go to lose herself again in her dreams, in
the limitless vision of all that we do not know, and all that we
may believe. Often she astounded him by her explanations. Her mind,
nourished on science, started from proved truths, but with such an
impetus that she bounded at once straight into the heaven of the
legends. All sorts of mediators passed there, angels and saints and
supernatural inspirations, modifying matter, endowing it with life; or,
again,