ose father wrote
articles much appreciated by the public in the 'Revue des Deux
Mondes.' "But he said at the same time that it was horrid to give such
crack-brained stuff to us poor girls. Happily, our subject this week is
much nicer. We have to make comparisons between La Tristesse d'Olympio,
Souvenir, and Le Lac'. That will be something interesting."

"The Tristesse d'Olympio?" repeated Giselle, in a tone of interrogation.

"You know, of course, that it is Victor Hugo's," said Mademoiselle de
Wermant, with a touch of pity.

Giselle answered with sincerity and humility, "I only knew that Le Lac
was by Lamartine."

"Well!--she knows that much," whispered Belle to Yvonne--"just that
much, anyhow."

While they were whispering and laughing, Jacqueline recited, in a soft
voice, and with feeling that did credit to her instructor in elocution,
Mademoiselle X----, of the Theatre Francais:

May the moan of the wind, the green rushes' soft sighing,
The fragrance that floats in the air you have moved,
May all heard, may all breathed, may all seen, seem but trying
To say: They have loved.

Then she added, after a pause: "Isn't that beautiful?"

"How dares she say such words?" thought Giselle, whose sense of
propriety was outraged by this allusion to love. Fred, too, looked
askance and was not comfortable, for he thought that Jacqueline had too
much assurance for her age, but that, after all, she was becoming more
and more charming.

At that moment Belle and Yvonne were summoned, and they departed, full
of an intention to spread everywhere the news that Giselle, the little
goose, had actually known that Le Lac had been written by Lamartine. The
Benedictine Sisters positively had acquired that much knowledge.

These girls were not the only persons that day at the reception who
indulged in a little ill-natured talk after going away. Mesdames d'Argy
and de Monredon, on their way to the Faubourg St. Germain, criticised
Madame de Nailles pretty freely. As they crossed the Parc Monceau
to reach their carriage, which was waiting for them on the Boulevard
Malesherbes, they made the young people, Giselle and Fred, walk ahead,
that they might have an opportunity of expressing themselves freely, the
old dowager especially, whose toothless mouth never lost an opportunity
of smirching the character and the reputation of her neighbors.

"When I think of the pains my poor cousin de Nailles took to impress
upon us