reason, would perhaps have killed her in a
fit of jealousy.

It was only her knowledge of the laws and of the world that enabled her
to control the swift instinct with which country folk, like wild men,
reduce impulse to action. In this alone, perhaps, lies the difference
between natural and civilized man. The savage has only impulse; the
civilized man has impulses and ideas. And in the savage the brain
retains, as we may say, but few impressions, it is wholly at the mercy
of the feeling that rushes in upon it; while in the civilized man, ideas
sink into the heart and change it; he has a thousand interests and many
feelings, where the savage has but one at a time. This is the cause of
the transient ascendency of a child over its parents, which ceases as
soon as it is satisfied; in the man who is still one with nature, this
contrast is constant. Cousin Betty, a savage of Lorraine, somewhat
treacherous too, was of this class of natures, which are commoner among
the lower orders than is supposed, accounting for the conduct of the
populace during revolutions.

At the time when this _Drama_ opens, if Cousin Betty would have allowed
herself to be dressed like other people; if, like the women of Paris,
she had been accustomed to wear each fashion in its turn, she would have
been presentable and acceptable, but she preserved the stiffness of a
stick. Now a woman devoid of all the graces, in Paris simply does not
exist. The fine but hard eyes, the severe features, the Calabrian fixity
of complexion which made Lisbeth like a figure by Giotto, and of which a
true Parisian would have taken advantage, above all, her strange way of
dressing, gave her such an extraordinary appearance that she sometimes
looked like one of those monkeys in petticoats taken about by little
Savoyards. As she was well known in the houses connected by family which
she frequented, and restricted her social efforts to that little circle,
as she liked her own home, her singularities no longer astonished
anybody; and out of doors they were lost in the immense stir of Paris
street-life, where only pretty women are ever looked at.

Hortense's laughter was at this moment caused by a victory won over her
Cousin Lisbeth's perversity; she had just wrung from her an avowal she
had been hoping for these three years past. However secretive an old
maid may be, there is one sentiment which will always avail to make her
break her fast from words, and that is her van