to his daughter the more important pages of the
mysterious book of life. Vain effort! He had to lament his daughter's
capricious indocility and ironical shrewdness too often to persevere
in a task so difficult as that of correcting an ill-disposed nature. He
contented himself with giving her from time to time some gentle and kind
advice; but he had the sorrow of seeing his tenderest words slide from
his daughter's heart as if it were of marble. A father's eyes are slow
to be unsealed, and it needed more than one experience before the old
Royalist perceived that his daughter's rare caresses were bestowed on
him with an air of condescension. She was like young children, who seem
to say to their mother, "Make haste to kiss me, that I may go to play."
In short, Emilie vouchsafed to be fond of her parents. But often, by
those sudden whims, which seem inexplicable in young girls, she kept
aloof and scarcely ever appeared; she complained of having to share her
father's and mother's heart with too many people; she was jealous of
every one, even of her brothers and sisters. Then, after creating a
desert about her, the strange girl accused all nature of her unreal
solitude and her wilful griefs. Strong in the experience of her twenty
years, she blamed fate, because, not knowing that the mainspring of
happiness is in ourselves, she demanded it of the circumstances of life.
She would have fled to the ends of the earth to escape a marriage such
as those of her two sisters, and nevertheless her heart was full of
horrible jealousy at seeing them married, rich, and happy. In short, she
sometimes led her mother--who was as much a victim to her vagaries as
Monsieur de Fontaine--to suspect that she had a touch of madness.

But such aberrations are quite inexplicable; nothing is commoner than
this unconfessed pride developed in the heart of young girls belonging
to families high in the social scale, and gifted by nature with great
beauty. They are almost all convinced that their mothers, now forty or
fifty years of age, can neither sympathize with their young souls, nor
conceive of their imaginings. They fancy that most mothers, jealous of
their girls, want to dress them in their own way with the premeditated
purpose of eclipsing them or robbing them of admiration. Hence, often,
secret tears and dumb revolt against supposed tyranny. In the midst of
these woes, which become very real though built on an imaginary basis,
they have also a mania