When she went to confession, she invented little sins in order that she
might stay there longer, kneeling in the shadow, her hands joined,
her face against the grating beneath the whispering of the priest.
The comparisons of betrothed, husband, celestial lover, and eternal
marriage, that recur in sermons, stirred within her soul depths of
unexpected sweetness.

In the evening, before prayers, there was some religious reading in
the study. On week-nights it was some abstract of sacred history or
the Lectures of the Abbe Frayssinous, and on Sundays passages from the
"Genie du Christianisme," as a recreation. How she listened at first to
the sonorous lamentations of its romantic melancholies reechoing
through the world and eternity! If her childhood had been spent in the
shop-parlour of some business quarter, she might perhaps have opened
her heart to those lyrical invasions of Nature, which usually come to
us only through translation in books. But she knew the country too well;
she knew the lowing of cattle, the milking, the ploughs.

Accustomed to calm aspects of life, she turned, on the contrary, to
those of excitement. She loved the sea only for the sake of its storms,
and the green fields only when broken up by ruins.

She wanted to get some personal profit out of things, and she rejected
as useless all that did not contribute to the immediate desires of her
heart, being of a temperament more sentimental than artistic, looking
for emotions, not landscapes.

At the convent there was an old maid who came for a week each month to
mend the linen. Patronized by the clergy, because she belonged to an