and regular, and at the same time a modest competence and a comfortable
placid success. She had a healthy appetite, ate much, slept well, and
was never ill.

She was clear-headed, sensible, modest, perfectly balanced, and never
worried about anything: for she always lived in and for the present,
without bothering her head about what had happened or what was going to
happen in the future. And as she was always well, and as her life was
comparatively secure from the sudden turns of fate, she was almost
always satisfied. She took the same pleasure in practising her piano as
in keeping house, or talking about things domestic, or doing nothing.
She had the art of living, not from day to day--(she was economical and
provident)--but from minute to minute. She was not possessed of any sort
of idealism: the only ideal she had, if it could be called so, was
bourgeois, and was unostentatiously expressed in her every action, and
evenly distributed through every moment of the day: it consisted in
peacefully loving everything she was doing, whatever it might be. She
went to church on Sundays: but the feeling of religion had practically
no place in her life. She admired enthusiasts, like Christophe, who had
faith or genius: but she did not envy them: what could she have done
with their uneasiness and their genius?

How came it, then, that she could feel their music? She would have found
it hard to say. But it was very certain that she did feel it. She was
superior to other virtuosi by reason of her sturdy quality of balance,
physical and moral: in her abounding vitality, in the absence of
personal passion, the passions of others found a rich soil in which to
come to flower. She was not touched by them. She could translate in all
their energy the terrible passions which had consumed the artist without
being tainted by their poison: she only felt their force and the great