ng for, especially if you have not to wait very long. Mademoiselle
is married certainly, and married early, and she is sufficiently well
informed to know, and to be sustained by the knowledge, that the
sentimental expansion which may not take place at present will have an
open field after her marriage. That it should precede her marriage seems
to her as unnatural as that she should put on her shoes before her
stockings. And besides all this, to browse in the maternal shadow is not
considered in the least a hardship. A young French girl who is _bien
elevee_--an expression which means so much--will be sure to consider her
mother's company the most delightful in the world, and to think that the
herbage which sprouts about this lady's petticoats is peculiarly tender
and succulent. It may be fanciful, but it often seems to me that the
tone with which such a young girl says _Ma mere_ has a peculiar
intensity of meaning. I am at least not wrong in affirming that in the
accent with which the mamma--especially if she be of the well-rounded
order alluded to above--speaks of _Ma fille_ there is a kind of
sacerdotal dignity.

V.

After this came two or three pictures of quite another
complexion--pictures of which a long green valley, almost in the centre
of France, makes the general setting. The valley itself, indeed, forms
one delightful picture, although the country which surrounds it is by no
means a show region. It is the old region of the Gatinais, which has
plenty of history, but no great beauty. It is very still, deliciously
rural, and immitigably French. Normandy is Norman, Gascony is Gascon,
but this is France itself--the typical, average, "pleasant" France of
history, literature, and art--of art, of landscape art, perhaps,
especially. Wherever I look in the country I seem to see one of the
familiar pictures on a dealer's wall--a Lambinet, a Troyon, a Daubigny,
a Diaz. The Lambinets perhaps are in the majority; the mood of the
landscape usually expresses itself in silvery lights and vivid greens.
The history of this part of France is the history of the monarchy, and
its language is, I won't say absolutely the classic tongue, but a nearer
approach to it than any local _patois_. The peasants deliver themselves
with rather a drawl, but what they speak is good clean French that any
cockney can understand, which is more than can be said sometimes for
the violent jargon that emanates from the fishing folk of Etretal.