till that day she had so enthusiastically loved. Hitherto she had been
answering in monosyllables all attempts of the great man to draw her into
conversation; but now, observing how Isaura blushed and looked down, that
strange faculty in women, which we men call dissimulation, and which in
them is truthfulness to their own nature, enabled her to carry off the
sharpest anguish she had ever experienced, by a sudden burst of levity of
spirit. She caught up some commonplace the Minister had adapted to what
he considered the poverty of her understanding, with a quickness of
satire which startled that grave man, and he gazed at her astonished. Up
to that moment he had secretly admired her as a girl well brought up--as
girls fresh from a French convent are supposed to be; now, hearing her
brilliant rejoinder to his stupid observation, he said inly: "Dame! the
low birth of a financier's daughter shows itself."

But, being a clever man himself, her retort put him on his mettle, and he
became, to his own amazement, brilliant himself. With that matchless
quickness which belongs to Parisians, the guests around him seized the
new esprit de conversation which had been evoked between the statesman
and the childlike girl beside him; and as they caught up the ball,
lightly flung among them, they thought within themselves how much more
sparkling the financier's pretty, lively daughter was than that dark-eyed
young muse, of whom all the journalists of Paris were writing in a chorus
of welcome and applause, and who seemed not to have a word to say worth
listening to, except to the handsome young Marquis, whom, no doubt, she
wished to fascinate.

Valerie fairly outshone Isaura in intellect and in wit; and neither
Valerie nor Isaura cared, to the value of a bean-straw, about that
distinction. Each was thinking only of the prize which the humblest
peasant women have in common with the most brilliantly accomplished of