daughter who works to support her parents,
gives private lessons from morning to night, forgets in the excitement
of a profession all the troubles of the household. No, she had
understood her task in a different sense, a sedentary bee restricting
her cares to the hive, without once humming out of doors in the open air
among the flowers. A thousand functions: tailoress, milliner, mender
of clothes, bookkeeper also for M. Joyeuse, who, incapable of all
responsibility, left to her the free disposal of their means, to be
pianoforte-teacher, governess.

As it happens in families that have been in a good position, Aline,
as the eldest daughter, had been educated at one of the best
boarding-schools in Paris. Elise had been with her there for two years;
but the last two, born too late, and sent to small day-schools in the
locality, had all their studies yet to complete, and this was no easy
matter, the youngest laughing upon every occasion from sheer good
health, warbling like a lark intoxicated with the delight of green corn,
and flying away far out of sight of desk and exercises, while Mlle.
Henriette, ever haunted by her ideas of grandeur, her love of luxurious
things, took to work hardly less unwillingly. This young person of
fifteen, to whom her father had transmitted something of his imaginative
faculties, was already arranging her life in advance and declared
formally that she should marry one of the nobility, and would never
have more than three children: "A boy to inherit the name and two little
girls--so as to be able to dress them alike."

"Yes, that's right," Bonne Maman would say, "you shall dress them alike.
In the meantime, let us attend to our participles a little."

But the one who caused the most concern was Elise, with her examination
taken thrice without success, always failing in history and preparing
herself anew, seized by a deep fear and a mistrust of herself which
made her carry about with her everywhere and open every moment that
unfortunate history of France, in the omnibus, in the street, even at
the luncheon-table; she was already a grown girl and very pretty, and
she no longer possessed that little mechanical memory of childhood
wherein dates and events lodge themselves for the whole of one's life.
Beset by other preoccupations, the lesson was forgotten in an instant,
despite the apparent application of the pupil, with her long lashes
fringing her eyes, her curls sweeping over the pages, and her