She was rather short, a little crooked, possibly hump-backed; but no
one had ever been inquisitive enough to ascertain the nature of her
perfections or her imperfections. Dressed in the same style as
Mademoiselle du Guenic, she stirred an enormous quantity of petticoats
and linen whenever she wanted to find one or other of the two
apertures of her gown through which she reached her pockets. The
strangest jingling of keys and money then echoed among her garments.
She always wore, dangling from one side, the bunch of keys of a good
housekeeper, and from the other her silver snuff-box, thimble,
knitting-needles, and other implements that were also resonant.
Instead of Mademoiselle Zephirine's wadded hood, she wore a green
bonnet, in which she may have visited her melons, for it had passed,
like them, from green to yellowish; as for its shape, our present
fashions are just now bringing it back to Paris, after twenty years
absence, under the name of Bibi. This bonnet was constructed under her
own eye and by the hands of her nieces, out of green Florence silk
bought at Guerande, and an old bonnet-shape, renewed every five years
at Nantes,--for Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel allowed her bonnets the
longevity of a legislature. Her nieces also made her gowns, cut by an
immutable pattern. The old lady still used the cane with the short
hook that all women carried in the early days of Marie-Antoinette. She
belonged to the very highest nobility of Brittany. Her arms bore the
ermine of its ancient dukes. In her and in her sister the illustrious
Breton house of the Pen-Hoels ended. Her younger sister had married a
Kergarouet, who, in spite of the deep disapproval of the whole region,
added the name of Pen-Hoel to his own and called himself the Vicomte
de Kergarouet-Pen-Hoel.

"Heaven has punished him," said the old lady; "he has nothing but
daughters, and the Kergarouet-Pen-Hoel name will be wiped out."