Jacques Brigaut was worthy of Pierrette Lorrain, who was just fifteen.
Two children! Pierrette could not keep from crying as she watched his
flight in the terror her gesture had conveyed to him. Then she sat
down in a shabby armchair placed before a little table above which
hung a mirror. She rested her elbows on the table, put her head in her
hands, and sat thinking for an hour, calling to memory the Marais, the
village of Pen-Hoel, the perilous voyages on a pond in a boat untied
for her from an old willow by little Jacques; then the old faces of
her grandfather and grandmother, the sufferings of her mother, and the
handsome face of Major Brigaut,--in short, the whole of her careless
childhood. It was all a dream, a luminous joy on the gloomy background
of the present.

Her beautiful chestnut hair escaped in disorder from her cap, rumpled
in sleep,--a cambric cap with ruffles, which she had made herself. On
each side of her forehead were little ringlets escaping from gray
curl-papers. From the back of her head hung a heavy braid of hair that
was half unplaited. The excessive whiteness of her face betrayed that
terrible malady of girlhood which goes by the name of chlorosis,
deprives the body of its natural colors, destroys the appetite, and
shows a disordered state of the organism. The waxy tones were in all
the visible parts of her flesh. The neck and shoulders explained by
their blanched paleness the wasted arms, flung forward and crossed
upon the table. Her feet seemed enervated, shrunken from illness. Her
night-gown came only to her knees and showed the flaccid muscles, the
blue veins, the impoverished flesh of the legs. The cold, to which she
paid no heed, turned her lips violet, and a sad smile, drawing up the
corners of a sensitive mouth, showed teeth that were white as ivory
and quite small,--pretty, transparent teeth, in keeping with the
delicate ears, the rather sharp but dainty nose, and the general