schoolroom this afternoon with the mathematical class. The room did not
lend itself to description, for it had bare walls and two long windows
looking down disconsolately upon a courtyard, where a grey cat sunned
herself in the daytime and bewailed her lot at night. Who, indeed, would
be a convent cat?

At the far end of the long room Mademoiselle Denise Lange was
superintending, with an earnest face, the studies of five young ladies.
It was only necessary to look at the respective heads of the pupils to
conclude that these young persons were engaged in mathematical problems,
for there is nothing so discomposing to the hair as arithmetic.
Mademoiselle Lange herself seemed no more capable of steering a course
through a double equation than her pupils, for she was young and pretty,
with laughing lips and fair hair, now somewhat ruffled by her
calculations. When, however, she looked up, it might have been perceived
that her glance was clear and penetrating.

There was no more popular person in the Convent of the Sacred Heart than
Denise Lange, and in no walk of life is personal attractiveness so
much appreciated as in a girls' school. It is only later in life that
_ces demoiselles_ begin to find that their neighbour's beauty is
but skin-deep. The nuns--"fond fools," Mademoiselle Brun called
them--concluded that because Denise was pretty she must be good. The
girls loved Denise with a wild and exceedingly ephemeral affection,
because she was little more than a girl herself, and was, like
themselves, liable to moments of deep arithmetical despondency.
Mademoiselle Brun admitted that she was fond of Denise because she was
her second cousin, and that was all.

When worldly mammas, essentially of the second empire, who perhaps had