perfectly incapable of darning their stockings or of boiling an egg.

And so they soon blush at their father's obscure condition and evince a
mortal disgust of the modest joys of the poor fire-side.

"Heavens! how little it all is!" Such was the first word which escaped her
when she returned to her father's house.

She had grown, and everything she saw on her return had shrank; her father
like the rest, perhaps more than the rest. She loved him all the same, but
she could not help finding him common.

She, the dainty young lady, brought up with the daughters of
country-gentlemen and generals, she said to herself that she was only the
daughter of an obscure captain, and it humiliated her. Ah! if her haughty
friends with whom she had exchanged confidences and dreams, had seen her
coming down the sumptuous stairs of her castles in Spain to go and live in
a poor village, while her father perspired over his cabbage-planting.

Her dreams! You know them well, and have also told them in quiet at the age
when you know how to form them:

At the age when you cease to be called a little girl, when the dress-maker
has just lengthened your dress, when your father's friends are no longer
familiar, but say with a smile: _Mademoiselle_.

At the age, when you feel the attraction of the unknown redouble its power,
when for the first time you feel a conscious blush at the look of a man.

At the age when the likeness of the young cousin you saw yesterday, appears