untrammelled grandeur and certain needs, to which the provincial world
she lived in offered no sustenance. All books pictured Love to her,
and she sought for the evidence of its existence, but nowhere could
she see the passion of which she read. Love was in her heart, like
seeds in the earth, awaiting the action of the sun. Her deep
melancholy, caused by constant meditation on herself, brought her back
by hidden by-ways to the brilliant dreams of her girlish days. Many a
time she must have lived again that old romantic poem, making herself
both the actor and the subject of it. Again she saw that island bathed
in light, flowery, fragrant, caressing to her soul. Often her pallid
eyes wandered around a salon with piercing curiosity. The men were all
like Graslin. She studied them, and then she seemed to question their
wives; but nothing on the faces of those women revealed an inward
anguish like to hers, and she returned home sad and gloomy and
distressed about herself. The authors she had read in the morning
answered to the feelings in her soul; their thoughts pleased her; but
at night she heard only empty words, not even presented in a lively
way,--dull, empty, foolish conversations in petty local matters, or
personalities of no interest to her. She was often surprised at the
heat displayed in discussions which concerned no feeling or sentiment
--to her the essence of existence, the soul of life.

Often she was seen with fixed eyes, mentally absorbed, thinking no
doubt of the days of her youthful ignorance spent in that chamber full
of harmonies now forever passed away. She felt a horrible repugnance
against dropping into the gulf of pettiness in which the women among
whom she lived were floundering. This repugnance, stamped on her
forehead, on her lips, and ill-disguised, was taken for the insolence
of a parvenue. Madame Graslin began to observe on all faces a certain
coldness; she felt in all remarks an acrimony, the causes of which