on into minute matters of arrangement and
decoration. You can see from this window the straight paths, the box
in [225] patterns, the yew trees and clipped alleys of our garden. You
may notice that in our garden-beds we have none but flowers of the
period--lilies, rose-mallows, immortelles, rose-pinks, in short what
people call parsonage flowers--des fleurs de cure. Our old silvan
tapestries, similarly, are of that age. You see too that all our
furniture, from presses and sideboards, down to our little tables and
our arm-chairs, is in the severest style of Louis the Fourteenth. My
father did not appreciate the dainty research of our modern luxury. He
maintained that our excessive care for the comforts of life weakened
mind as well as body. That," added the girl with a laugh,--"that is
why you find your chair so hard when you come to see us."

Then, with resumed gravity--"It was thus that my father endeavoured, by
the very aspect and arrangement of outward things, to promote in
himself the imaginary presence of the epoch in which his thoughts
delighted. As for myself--need I tell you that I was the confidant of
that father, so well-beloved: a confidant touched by his sorrows, full
of indignation at his disappointments, charmed by his consolations.
Here, precisely--surrounded by those books which we read together, and
which he taught me to love--it is here that I have passed the
pleasantest hours of my youth. In common we indulged our enthusiasm
for those days of faith; of the quiet life; its blissful hours of
leisure well-secured; for the French language in its beauty and purity;
the delicate, the noble urbanity, which was then the honour and the
special mark of our country, but has ceased to be so."

She paused, with a little confusion, as I thought, at the warmth of her
last words.

And then, just to break the silence, "You have explained," I said, "an
impression which I have experienced again and again in my visits here,
and which has sometimes reached the intensity of an actual illusion,
though a very agreeable one. The look of your house, its style, its
tone and keeping, carried me two centuries back so completely that I
should hardly have been surprised to hear Monsieur le Prince, Madame de
la Fayette, or Madame de Sevigne herself, announced at your
drawing-room door."

"Would it might be!" said Mademoiselle de Courteheuse. [226] "Ah!
Monsieur, how I love those people! What good company! What pleasur