her round and made the blood mount to her cheeks, and she would lose her
breath in the fear and pleasure of it. She could not understand it. And
then it would disappear as strangely as it had come. There was never
another sound. Hardly more than a faint buzzing, an imperceptible
resonance, fainter and fainter, in the blue air. Only she knew that it
was yonder, on the other side of the mountain, and thither she must go,
go as soon as possible: for there lay happiness. Ah! If only she could
reach it!...

In the meanwhile, until she should reach that land of happiness, she
wove strange dreams of what she would find there. For the chief
occupation of the child's mind was guessing at its nature. She had a
friend of her own age, Simone Adam, with whom she used often to discuss
these great subjects. Each brought to bear on them the light of her
twelve years' experience, conversations overheard and stolen reading. On
tip-toe, clinging to the crannies in the stones, the two little girls
strained to peer over the old wall which hid the future from them. But
it was all in vain, and it was idle for them to pretend that they could
see through the chinks: they could see nothing at all. They were both a
mixture of innocence, poetic salaciousness, and Parisian irony. They
used to say the most outrageous things without knowing it, and they were
always making mountains out of molehills. Jacqueline, who was always
prying, without anybody to find fault with her, used to burrow in all
her father's books. Fortunately, she was protected from coming to any
harm by her very innocence and her own young, healthy instincts: an
unduly described scene or a coarse word disgusted her at once: she would
drop the book at once, and she passed through the most infamous company,
like a frightened cat through puddles of dirty water,--without so much
as a splash.