sweetly stale odours--musty treasures in which the Chateau de Mauves
abounded. She made a dozen sketches in water-colours after her
conventual pattern; but sentimentally, as one may say, she was for ever
sketching with a freer hand.

Old Madame de Mauves had nothing severe but her nose, and she seemed to
Euphemia--what indeed she had every claim to pass for--the very image
and pattern of an "historical character." Belonging to a great order of
things, she patronised the young stranger who was ready to sit all day
at her feet and listen to anecdotes of the bon temps and quotations from
the family chronicles. Madame de Mauves was a very honest old woman; she
uttered her thoughts with ancient plainness. One day after pushing back
Euphemia's shining locks and blinking with some tenderness from behind
an immense face-a-main that acted as for the relegation of the girl
herself to the glass case of a museum, she declared with an energetic
shake of the head that she didn't know what to make of such a little
person. And in answer to the little person's evident wonder, "I should
like to advise you," she said, "but you seem to me so all of a piece
that I'm afraid that if I advise you I shall spoil you. It's easy to see
you're not one of us. I don't know whether you're better, but you seem
to me to have been wound up by some key that isn't kept by your
governess or your confessor or even your mother, but that you wear by a
fine black ribbon round your own neck. Little persons in my day--when
they were stupid they were very docile, but when they were clever they
were very sly! You're clever enough, I imagine, and yet if I guessed all
your secrets at this moment is there one I should have to frown at? I
can tell you a wickeder one than any you've discovered for yourself. If
you wish to live at ease in the doux pays de France don't trouble too
much about the key of your conscience or even about your conscience
itself--I mean your own particular one. You'll fancy it saying things it