that under whatever form they were presented to her, they
would assuredly clash sooner or later with his peculiar system
of education. For himself, his opinions on such matters were
expressed when occasion arose, only in certain unvarying and
vehement declamations against priests and nuns--the latter
particularly, where his general sense of aversion to a class
in the abstract, became specific and definite, when he looked
upon that class as represented in the person of his sister
Thérèse.

Of the outward forms and ceremonies of religion Madelon could
not, indeed, remain entirely ignorant, living constantly, as
she did, in Roman Catholic countries; but her very familiarity
with these from her babyhood robbed them in great measure of
the interest they might otherwise have excited in her mind,
and their significance she was never taught to understand. As
a rule, a child must have its attention drawn in some
particular way to its everyday surroundings, or they must
strike it in some new and unfamiliar light, before they rouse
more than a passing curiosity; and though Madelon would
sometimes question her father as to the meaning and intention
of this or that procession passing along the streets, he found
no difficulty in putting her off with vague answers. It was a
wedding or a funeral, he would say, or connected with some
other ordinary event, which Madelon knew to be of daily
recurrence; though none such had as yet had part in the
economy of her small world; and priests, and nuns, and monks
became classed, without difficulty, in her mind, with doctors
and soldiers, and the mass of people generally, who made money
in a different way from her father, with whom, therefore, she