ch many a
white and golden maid pays toll for her milky whiteness. Tall, round
without being fat, with a slender dignity as noble as her mother's,
she really deserved the name of goddess, of which old authors were so
lavish. In fact, those who saw Hortense in the street could hardly
restrain the exclamation, "What a beautiful girl!"

She was so genuinely innocent, that she could say to her mother:

"What do they mean, mamma, by calling me a beautiful girl when I am
with you? Are not you much handsomer than I am?"

And, in point of fact, at seven-and-forty the Baroness might have been
preferred to her daughter by amateurs of sunset beauty; for she had
not yet lost any of her charms, by one of those phenomena which are
especially rare in Paris, where Ninon was regarded as scandalous,
simply because she thus seemed to enjoy such an unfair advantage over
the plainer women of the seventeenth century.

Thinking of her daughter brought her back to the father; she saw him
sinking by degrees, day after day, down to the social mire, and even
dismissed some day from his appointment. The idea of her idol's fall,
with a vague vision of the disasters prophesied by Crevel, was such a
terror to the poor woman, that she became rapt in the contemplation
like an ecstatic.

Cousin Betty, from time to time, as she chatted with Hortense, looked
round to see when they might return to the drawing-room; but her young
cousin was pelting her with questions, and at the moment when the
Baroness opened the glass door she did not happen to be looking.

Lisbeth Fischer, though the daughter of the eldest of the three
brothers, was five years younger than Madame Hulot; she was far from
being as handsome as her cousin, and had been desperately jealous of
Adeline. Jealousy was the fundamental passion of this character,
marked by eccentricities--a word invented by the English to describe
the craziness not of the asylum, but of respectable households. A
native of the Vosges, a peasant in the fullest sense of the word,
lean, brown, with shining black hair and thick eyebrows joining in a
tuft, with long, strong arms, thick feet, and some moles on her narrow
simian face--such is a brief description of the elderly virgin.

The family, living all under one roof, had sacrificed the
common-looking girl to the beauty, the bitter fruit to the splendid
flower. Lisbeth worked in the fields, while her cousin was indulged;
and one day, when they were alone t