Chevrel, sat so upright in the stool behind her desk, that more than
once she had heard some wag bet that she was a stuffed figure. Her
long, thin face betrayed exaggerated piety. Devoid of attractions or
of amiable manners, Madame Guillaume commonly decorated her head--that
of a woman near on sixty--with a cap of a particular and unvarying
shape, with long lappets, like that of a widow. In all the
neighborhood she was known as the "portress nun." Her speech was curt,
and her movements had the stiff precision of a semaphore. Her eye,
with a gleam in it like a cat's, seemed to spite the world because she
was so ugly. Mademoiselle Virginie, brought up, like her younger
sister, under the domestic rule of her mother, had reached the age of
eight-and-twenty. Youth mitigated the graceless effect which her
likeness to her mother sometimes gave to her features, but maternal
austerity had endowed her with two great qualities which made up for
everything. She was patient and gentle. Mademoiselle Augustine, who
was but just eighteen, was not like either her father or her mother.
She was one of those daughters whose total absence of any physical
affinity with their parents makes one believe in the adage: "God gives
children." Augustine was little, or, to describe her more truly,
delicately made. Full of gracious candor, a man of the world could
have found no fault in the charming girl beyond a certain meanness of
gesture or vulgarity of attitude, and sometimes a want of ease. Her
silent and placid face was full of the transient melancholy which
comes over all young girls who are too weak to dare to resist their
mother's will.

The two sisters, always plainly dressed, could not gratify the innate
vanity of womanhood but by a luxury of cleanliness which became them
wonderfully, and made them harmonize with the polished counters and
the shining shelves, on which the old man-servant never left a speck