Anne and Marie are listening respectfully, while the two inseparables, only half-attentive, are sharing a box of sweets.
Roseline throws her arms round me and, shrugging her shoulders, says:
"All this strikes me as such utter nonsense!"
She is certainly right, with her Normandy common sense; but does she not need just a touch of this same nonsense to bring her faculties into play, her powers into action?
4
When I return to the drawing-room, Blanche calls me with a laugh of delight:
"Oh, look!" she cries. "I've found a book with a portrait of my beloved Elizabeth Browning. Look at that sweet, gentle face, surrounded with ringlets: it's just as I imagined her. I love her all the better now."
They had opened other books written by women and, leaning over the table, were comparing the frontispiece portraits of the authors, interesting or handsome, grave or smiling, young or old. Even so do certain little volumes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries open nearly always with an engraving faded by time and representing charming faces all of the same class and often with similar expressions and features: a delicate nose, a bow-shaped, smiling mouth, intelligent eyes with no mysterious depths, dimpled cheeks, a string of pearls round the neck, a loosely-tied kerchief just revealing a swelling bosom, wanton curls dancing against a dark background in a frame of roses upheld by Cupids. And the quiver and the arrows and the flying ribbons and the turtle-doves: all this, joined to the letters, the maxims or the verses, often grave or even sad, sometimes calm and reasonable, sometimes passionate, brings before us in a few strokes the harmonious picture of woman's life.
"It is no longer the fashion in these days," murmured Blanche. "And yet is there not an intimate relation between a woman's work and her appearance?"
"That is the reason, no doubt," replied Marcienne, "why it seems, unlike man's, to grow smaller as it passes out of the present. We see the immortal pages disappear like the fallen petals of a flower. It's sad, don't you think?"