This difference in their natures was reflected on the faces of the two sisters. Rosalie had regular features with great purity in their lines, calm eyes of a color changing constantly like that of a deep lake; the other’s features were very irregular, her expression clever, her complexion the pale tint of a Creole woman. There were the North and the South in the father and the mother, two very different temperaments which had united without merging together; each was perpetuating its own race in one of the children, and all this, notwithstanding the life in common, the similar education in a great boarding-school for young girls, where, under the same masters, and only a few years later, Hortense was taking up the scholastic tradition which had made of her sister an attentive, serious woman, always ready to the minute, absorbed in her smallest acts. That same education had left her tumultuous, fantastic, unsteady of soul and always in a hurry. Sometimes, when she saw her so agitated, Rosalie cried out:
“I must say I am very lucky; I have no imagination.”
“As for me, I haven’t anything else,” said Hortense; and she reminded her how at boarding school, when M. Baudouy was given the task of teaching them style and the development of thought, during that course which he pompously termed his imagination class, Rosalie had never had any success, because she expressed everything in a few concise words, whereas she, on the other hand, given an idea as big as your nail, was able to blacken whole volumes with print.
“That’s the only prize I ever got—the imagination prize!”
Despite it all they were a tenderly united couple, bound to each other by one of those affections between an elder and a younger sister into which an element of the filial and maternal enters. Rosalie took her about with her everywhere, to balls, to her friends’ houses, on her shopping trips in which the taste of Parisian women is exercised; even after leaving the boarding-school she remained her younger sister’s little mother. And now she is occupying herself with getting her married, with finding for her some quiet and trustworthy companion, indispensable for such a madcap as she is, the powerful arm which is needed to offset her enthusiasms.
It was plain that the man she meant was Méjean; but Hortense, who at first did not say no, suddenly showed an evident antipathy. They had a long talk about it the day following the ministerial reception, when Rosalie had detected the emotion and trouble of her sister.
“O, he is kind and I like him well enough,” said Hortense, “he is one of those loyal friends such as one would like to have about one all one’s life; but that is not the sort of husband that will do for me.”
“Why?”
“You will laugh at me. He does not appeal to my imagination enough; there it is! A marriage with him—why it makes me think of the house of a burgher, right-angled and stiff, at the end of an alley of trees which stand as straight as the letter I; and you know well enough that I love something else—the unexpected, surprises—”
“Well, who then? M. de Lappara?”