at first chosen Mussel's poems, a volume of Rousseau, and _Indiana_; for
while she considered light reading as unwholesome as sweets and cakes, she
did not reflect that the strong breath of genius must have upon the very
soul of a child an influence at once more dangerous and less quickening
than those of fresh air and country breezes upon his body. But when my
father had seemed almost to regard her as insane on learning the names of
the books she proposed to give me, she had journeyed back by herself to
Jouy-le-Vicomte to the bookseller's, so that there should be no fear of my
not having my present in time (it was a burning hot day, and she had come
home so unwell that the doctor had warned my mother not to allow her again
to tire herself in that way), and had there fallen back upon the four
pastoral novels of George Sand.

"My dear," she had said to Mamma, "I could not allow myself to give the
child anything that was not well written."

The truth was that she could never make up her mind to purchase anything
from which no intellectual profit was to be derived, and, above all, that
profit which good things bestowed on us by teaching us to seek our
pleasures elsewhere than in the barren satisfaction of worldly wealth.
Even when she had to make some one a present of the kind called 'useful,'
when she had to give an armchair or some table-silver or a walking-stick,
she would choose 'antiques,' as though their long desuetude had effaced
from them any semblance of utility and fitted them rather to instruct us
in the lives of the men of other days than to serve the common
requirements of our own. She would have liked me to have in my room
photographs of ancient buildings or of beautiful places. But at the moment
of buying them, and for all that the subject of the picture had an
aesthetic value of its own, she would find that vulgarity and utility had
too prominent a part in them, through the mechanical nature of their