her moral health; none but he to raise her above her
material life, none but he to cheer her with moving words of charity and
hope,--such divine words as she has never heard from the mouths of the
men of her family and of her class.

After entering the service of Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, Germinie
became profoundly religious and cared for nothing but the church. She
abandoned herself little by little to the sweet delight of confession,
to the priest's smooth, tranquil bass voice that came to her from the
darkness, to the conversations which resembled the touch of soothing
words, and from which she went forth refreshed, light of heart, free
from care, and happy with a delightful sense of relief, as if a balm had
been applied to all the tender, suffering, fettered portions of her
being.

She did not, could not, open her heart elsewhere. Her mistress had a
certain masculine roughness of demeanor which repelled expansiveness.
She had an abrupt, exclamatory way of speaking that forced back all that
Germinie would have liked to confide to her. It was in her nature to be
brutal in her treatment of all lamentations that were not caused by pain
or disappointment. Her virile kindliness had no pity to spare for
diseases of the imagination, for the suffering that is created by the
thought, for the weariness of spirit that flows from a woman's nerves
and from the disordered condition of her mental organism. Germinie often
found her unfeeling; the old woman had simply been hardened by the times
in which she had lived and by the circumstances of her life. The shell
of her heart was as hard as her body. Never complaining herself, she did
not like to hear complaints about her. And by the right of all the tears
she had not shed, she detested childish tears in grown persons.

Soon the confessional became a sort of sacred, idolized rendezvous for
Germinie's thoughts. Every day it was her first idea, the theme of her
first prayer. Throughout the day, she was kneeling there as in a dream;
and while she was about her work it was constantly before her eyes, with
its oaken frame with fillets of gold, its pediment in the shape of a
winged angel's head, its green curtain with the motionless folds, and
the mysterious darkness on both sides. It seemed to her that now her
whole life centred there, and that every hour tended thither. She lived
through the week looking forward to that longed-for, prayed-for,
promised day. On Thursday, she began t