his refusal, might obtain some high position. Henriette, who was
thought happy in her married life, would not reveal, even to her
mother, her tragic sufferings and the fatal incapacity of her husband.
It was to hide his condition from the duchess that she persuaded him
to go to Tours and transact business with his notaries. I alone, as
she had truly said, knew the dark secret of Clochegourde. Having
learned by experience how the pure air and the blue sky of the lovely
valley calmed the excitements and soothed the morbid griefs of the
diseased mind, and what beneficial effect the life at Clochegourde had
upon the health of her children, she opposed her mother's desire that
she should leave it with reasons which the overbearing woman, who was
less grieved than mortified by her daughter's bad marriage, vigorously
combated.

Henriette saw that the duchess cared little for Jacques and Madeleine,
--a terrible discovery! Like all domineering mothers who expect to
continue the same authority over their married daughters that they
maintained when they were girls, the duchess brooked no opposition;
sometimes she affected a crafty sweetness to force her daughter to
compliance, at other times a cold severity, intending to obtain by
fear what gentleness had failed to win; then, when all means failed,
she displayed the same native sarcasm which I had often observed in my
own mother. In those ten days Henriette passed through all the
contentions a young woman must endure to establish her independence.
You, who for your happiness have the best of mothers, can scarcely
comprehend such trials. To gain a true idea of the struggle between
that cold, calculating, ambitious woman and a daughter abounding in
the tender natural kindness that never faileth, you must imagine a
lily, to which my heart has always compared her, bruised beneath the
polished wheels of a steel car. That mother had nothing in common with