years_!

Beside me in the school-room sat a buxom peasant-woman, who, as a little
girl crowned with a gaudy tinsel wreath descended from the platform,
confidentially informed me, "_C'est ma fille._ She has taken the
prize for good conduct, and there isn't a worse _coquine_ in our
whole commune."

I saw the pale visionaries, a circle of black-robed figures, with
dead-white bands, like coffin-cerements, across their brows. I saw them
almost unanimously fat, with pendulous jowls and black and broken teeth,
as remote from any expression of mystic fervors and spiritual espousals
as could be well imagined, _"Vieilles commères_!" grunted my
_paysanne,_ who was evidently neither amiable nor saintly.

Mother Mary-of-the-Angels, once Elise Gautier, was short, fat, and
bustling, with large round-eyed spectacles upon her nose, and the pasty
complexion and premature flaccid wrinkles that come with long seclusion
from sunshine and exercise. She marched about like one who had chosen
Martha's rather than Mary's manner of serving her Lord, and we saw her
chat a full half-hour with the wife of the Maire, bowing, smiling,
gesticulating meantime with all the florid grace of a French woman of
the world.

"The Maire's wife was her former intimate friend," whispered Victoire.
"See how much younger and healthier she looks than the Mother Superior,
and how much happier. _On dit_ that it was chagrin at the marriage
of this friend that caused Élise Gautier to desert her widowed father
and dependent little brothers and sisters to bury herself in a convent."