will. Her neck was rather long,
allowing her to affect beautiful attitudes of scorn and impertinence.
She had cultivated a large variety of those turns of the head and
feminine gestures, which emphasize so cruelly or so happily a hint of
a smile. Fine black hair, thick and strongly-arched eyebrows, lent her
countenance an expression of pride, to which her coquettish instincts
and her mirror had taught her to add terror by a stare, or gentleness by
the softness of her gaze, by the set of the gracious curve of her lips,
by the coldness or the sweetness of her smile. When Emilie meant to
conquer a heart, her pure voice did not lack melody; but she could
also give it a sort of curt clearness when she was minded to paralyze a
partner's indiscreet tongue. Her colorless face and alabaster brow were
like the limpid surface of a lake, which by turns is rippled by the
impulse of a breeze and recovers its glad serenity when the air is
still. More than one young man, a victim to her scorn, accused her of
acting a part; but she justified herself by inspiring her detractors
with the desire to please her, and then subjecting them to all her most
contemptuous caprice. Among the young girls of fashion, not one knew
better than she how to assume an air of reserve when a man of talent
was introduced to her, or how to display the insulting politeness which
treats an equal as an inferior, and to pour out her impertinence on all
who tried to hold their heads on a level with hers. Wherever she went
she seemed to be accepting homage rather than compliments, and even in
a princess her airs and manner would have transformed the chair on which
she sat into an imperial throne.

Monsieur de Fontaine discovered too late how utterly the education of
the daughter he loved had been ruined by the tender devotion of the
whole family. The admiration which the world is at first ready to bestow
on a young girl, but for which, sooner or later, it takes its revenge,
had added to Emilie's pride, and increased her self-confidence.
Universal subservience had developed in her the selfishness natural to
spoilt children, who, like kings, make a plaything of everything that
comes to hand. As yet the graces of youth and the charms of talent hid
these faults from every eye; faults all the more odious in a woman,
since she can only please by self-sacrifice and unselfishness; but
nothing escapes the eye of a good father, and Monsieur de Fontaine
often tried to explain