world which, for
the greater part, they will never be invited to see; and they return to
their father's humble roof, dreaming of balls, fetes, equipages, hotels,
drawing-rooms, the only surroundings in which they could profitably display
the useless accomplishments with which they have been endowed, but also
perfectly incapable of darning their stockings or of boiling an egg.

And so they soon blush at their father's obscure condition and evince a
mortal disgust of the modest joys of the poor fire-side.

"Heavens! how little it all is!" Such was the first word which escaped her
when she returned to her father's house.

She had grown, and everything she saw on her return had shrank; her father
like the rest, perhaps more than the rest. She loved him all the same, but
she could not help finding him common.

She, the dainty young lady, brought up with the daughters of
country-gentlemen and generals, she said to herself that she was only the
daughter of an obscure captain, and it humiliated her. Ah! if her haughty
friends with whom she had exchanged confidences and dreams, had seen her
coming down the sumptuous stairs of her castles in Spain to go and live in
a poor village, while her father perspired over his cabbage-planting.

Her dreams! You know them well, and have also told them in quiet at the age
when you know how to form them:

At the age when you cease to be called a little girl, when the dress-maker
has just lengthened your dress, when your father's friends are no longer
familiar, but say with a smile: _Mademoiselle_.

At the age, when you feel the attraction of the unknown redouble its power,
when for the first time you feel a conscious blush at the look of a man.

At the age when the likeness of the young cousin you saw yesterday, appears
all at once on the page of your history or grammar, and strange to say,
pursues you at your games; when the noisy games of your companions weary
you, and you betake yourself to solitude in order to screen your thoughts.

And solitude, a bad adviser, takes possession of your thoughts, isolates
them from the rest of the real world, in order to immerse them in imaginary
worlds, and then agitates, reflects, whirls, polishes all that marvellous
enchanted universe in which the daughters of Eve wander with each wild
license, whom the base-born sons of Adam approach only a single step.

But when that step is taken, the enchanted world vanishes. The scaffolding
cracks and fall