could in some sort catch the spirit, though she could not
enter into the idea. At the same time there was a certain
childlike vein running through all the old man's rambling
talk, which made it, after all, not unsuited to meet the
instinctive aspirations of a child's mind. With him love and
veneration for greatness and beauty, in every form, amounted
almost to a passion, which was still fresh and genuine, as in
the lad to whom the realization of the word _blasé_ seems the
one incomprehensible impossibility of life. In the simple
reverence with which he spoke of the great masters of his art,
Madelon might have recognized the same spirit as that which
animated the American; and as the artist had once uncovered at
the name of Raffaelle and Lionardo da Vinci, so did the
musician figuratively bow down at the shrines of Handel, or
Bach, or Beethoven. From both these men, so different in other
respects, the child began to learn the same lesson, which in
all her life before she had never even heard hinted at.

All this, however, almost overtaxed our little Madelon's
faculties, and it was not surprising that, as the winter wore
on, a change gradually came over her. In truth, both intellect
and imagination were being overstrained by the constant
succession of new images, new ideas, new thoughts, that
presented themselves to her. She by no means grew accustomed
to churches--not in the sense, at any rate, which her father
had hoped would be the result of his new system. It was not
possible that she should, while so much remained that was
mysterious and unexplained; she only wearied her small brain
with the effort to find the explanation for all these new
perplexities, which she felt must exist somewhere, though she