f a servant. She remained alone with her father, kept
down and humbled, shut out from his arms and his kisses, her heart heavy
with grief because she longed to love and had nothing to love. She was
beginning to suffer from the cold void that is formed about a woman by
an unattractive, unfascinating girlhood, by a girlhood devoid of beauty
and sympathetic charm. She could see that she aroused a sort of
compassion with her long nose, her yellow complexion, her angular
figure, her thin body. She felt that she was ugly, and that her ugliness
was made repulsive by her miserable costumes, her dismal, woolen dresses
which she made herself, her father paying for the material only after
much grumbling: she could not induce him to make her a small allowance
for her toilet until she was thirty-five.

How sad and bitter and lonely for her was her life with that morose,
sour old man, who was always scolding and complaining at home, affable
only in society, and who left her every evening to go to the great
houses that were reopened under the Directory and at the beginning of
the Empire! Only at very long intervals did he take her out, and when he
did, it was always to that everlasting _Vaudeville_, where he had boxes.
Even on those rare occasions, his daughter was terrified. She trembled
all the time that she was with him; she was afraid of his violent
disposition, of the tone of the old regime that his outbreaks of wrath
had retained, of the facility with which he would raise his cane at an
insolent remark from the _canaille_. On almost every occasion there were
scenes with the manager, wordy disputes with people in the pit, and
threats of personal violence to which she put an end by lowering the
curtain of the box. The same thing was kept up in the street, even in
the cab, with the driver, who would refuse to carry them at Monsieur de
Varandeuil's price and would keep them waiting one hour, two hours
without moving; sometimes would unharness his horse in his wrath and
leave him in the vehicle with his daughter who would vainly implore him
to submit and pay the price demanded.

Considering that these diversions should suffice for Sempronie, and
having, moreover, a jealous desire to have her all to himself and always
under his hand, Monsieur de Varandeuil allowed her to form no intimacies
with anybody. He did not take her into society; he did not take her to
the houses of their kinsfolk who returned after the emigration, except
on d