into their natures. Under such training the two Maries would either
have become mere imbeciles, or they must necessarily have longed for
independence. Thus it came to pass that they looked to marriage as soon
as they saw anything of life and were able to compare a few ideas. Of
their own tender graces and their personal value they were absolutely
ignorant. They were ignorant, too, of their own innocence; how, then,
could they know life? Without weapons to meet misfortune, without
experience to appreciate happiness, they found no comfort in the
maternal jail, all their joys were in each other. Their tender
confidences at night in whispers, or a few short sentences exchanged if
their mother left them for a moment, contained more ideas than the words
themselves expressed. Often a glance, concealed from other eyes, by
which they conveyed to each other their emotions, was like a poem
of bitter melancholy. The sight of a cloudless sky, the fragrance of
flowers, a turn in the garden, arm in arm,--these were their joys. The
finishing of a piece of embroidery was to them a source of enjoyment.

Their mother's social circle, far from opening resources to their hearts
or stimulating their minds, only darkened their ideas and depressed
them; it was made up of rigid old women, withered and graceless, whose
conversation turned on the differences which distinguished various
preachers and confessors, on their own petty indispositions, on
religious events insignificant even to the "Quotidienne" or "l'Ami de
la Religion." As for the men who appeared in the Comtesse de Granville's
salon, they extinguished any possible torch of love, so cold and sadly
resigned were their faces. They were all of an age when mankind is sulky
and fretful, and natural sensibilities are chiefly exercised at table
and on the things relating to personal comfort. Religious egotism had
long dried up those hearts devoted to narrow duties and entrenched
behind pious practices. Silent games of cards occupied the whole
evening, and the two young girls under the ban of that Sanhedrim
enforced by maternal severity, came to hate the dispiriting personages
about them with their hollow eyes and scowling faces.

On the gloom of this life one sole figure of a man, that of a
music-master, stood vigorously forth. The confessors had decided that
music was a Christian art, born of the Catholic Church and developed
within her. The two Maries were therefore permitted to study mus