e stool behind her desk, that more than
once she had heard some wag bet that she was a stuffed figure. Her
long, thin face betrayed exaggerated piety. Devoid of attractions or of
amiable manners, Madame Guillaume commonly decorated her head--that of
a woman near on sixty--with a cap of a particular and unvarying shape,
with long lappets, like that of a widow. In all the neighborhood she was
known as the "portress nun." Her speech was curt, and her movements had
the stiff precision of a semaphore. Her eye, with a gleam in it like a
cat's, seemed to spite the world because she was so ugly. Mademoiselle
Virginie, brought up, like her younger sister, under the domestic rule
of her mother, had reached the age of eight-and-twenty. Youth mitigated
the graceless effect which her likeness to her mother sometimes gave
to her features, but maternal austerity had endowed her with two great
qualities which made up for everything. She was patient and gentle.
Mademoiselle Augustine, who was but just eighteen, was not like either
her father or her mother. She was one of those daughters whose total
absence of any physical affinity with their parents makes one believe in
the adage: "God gives children." Augustine was little, or, to describe
her more truly, delicately made. Full of gracious candor, a man of the
world could have found no fault in the charming girl beyond a certain
meanness of gesture or vulgarity of attitude, and sometimes a want of
ease. Her silent and placid face was full of the transient melancholy
which comes over all young girls who are too weak to dare to resist
their mother's will.

The two sisters, always plainly dressed, could not gratify the innate
vanity of womanhood but by a luxury of cleanliness which became them
wonderfully, and made them harmonize with the polished counters and
the shining shelves, on which the old man-servant never left a speck of
dust, and with the old-world simplicity of all they saw about them. As
their style of living compelled them to find the elements of happiness
in persistent work, Augustine and Virginie had hitherto always satisfied
their mother, who secretly prided herself on the perfect characters of
her two daughters. It is easy to imagine the results of the training
they had received. Brought up to a commercial life, accustomed to
hear nothing but dreary arguments and calculations about trade, having
studied nothing but grammar, book-keeping, a little Bible-history, and
the his