“Do you find no pleasure in being more fashionable than the others, better dressed and more noticed?”
“None, I assure you.”
“I want every one to mark your appearance as soon as you enter a salon. I want all the men to admire you and all the women to envy you. That is an artistic pleasure. But you are insensible to everything. You like nothing.”
“Oh, but I do like so many things.”
“What, for instance?”
“I need not tell you.”
I did not yet understand the tenderness of her feeling toward me. However, it was hardly like the sentiments I held toward her, and I ceased presently to compare them.
It was her greatest pleasure to remain at home, to play with Dilette, who laughed and appreciated her little mother always; or to read some “Introduction to a Devoted Life,” or “The Letters of Saint Francis of Sales to Mme. de Chanta” (in which he urges her to light her own fire in the morning rather than make her chambermaid rise before her); or perhaps some other pious work, or some fairy tales and legends, as if she were preparing herself for maternal instruction generally. She delighted too in such simple tales of good folk as gave them the air of having really lived. “Mireille” enchanted her, and “Genevieve, or the Story of a Servant,” and “Dominique” and “Ramuntcho,” and “Nerte,” in which she had underlined these four lines of a benediction which the Pope, traversing a path through the ripe grain, addresses to some workmen in the field:
Search peace in field and home—
It is the better part;