Jacqueline had nothing in common with a rose of any kind, but she was not the less charming to look at.  Such was the unspoken reflection of a man who was well able to be a judge in such matters.  His name was Hubert Marien.  He was a great painter, and was now watching the clear-cut, somewhat Arab—­like profile of this girl—­a profile brought out distinctly against the dark-red silk background of a screen, much as we see a cameo stand out in sharp relief from the glittering stone from which the artist has fashioned it.  Marien looked at her from a distance, leaning against the fireplace of the farther salon, whence he could see plainly the corner shaded by green foliage plants where Jacqueline had made her niche, as she called it.  The two rooms formed practically but one, being separated only by a large recess without folding-doors, or ‘portires’.  Hubert Marien, from his place behind Madame de Nailles’s chair, had often before watched Jacqueline as he was watching her at this moment.  She had grown up, as it were, under his own eye.  He had seen her playing with her dolls, absorbed in her story-books, and crunching sugar-plums, he had paid her visits—­for how many years?  He did not care to count them.

And little girls bloom fast!  How old they make us feel!  Who would have supposed the most unpromising of little buds would have transformed itself so soon into what he gazed upon?  Marien, as an artist, had great pleasure in studying the delicate outline of that graceful head surmounted by thick tresses, with rebellious ringlets rippling over the brow before they were gathered into the thick braid that hung behind; and Jacqueline, although she appeared to be wholly occupied with her guests, felt the gaze that was fixed upon her, and was conscious of its magnetic influence, from which nothing would have induced her to escape even had she been able.  All the young girls were listening attentively (despite their more serious occupation of consuming dainties) to what was going on in the next room among the grown-up people, whose conversation reached them only in detached fragments.

So long as the subject talked about was the last reception at the French Academy, these young girls (comrades in the class-room and at the weekly catechising) had been satisfied to discuss together their own little affairs, but after Colonel de Valdonjon began to talk complete silence reigned among them.  One might have heard the buzzing of a fly.  Their attention, however, was of little use.  Exclamations of oh! and ah! and protests more or less sincere drowned even the loud and somewhat hoarse voice of the Colonel.  The girls heard it only through a sort of general murmur, out of which a burst of astonishment or of dissent would occasionally break forth.  These outbreaks were all the curious group could hear distinctly.  They sniffed, as it were, at the forbidden fruit, but they longed to inhale the full perfume of the scandal that they felt was in the air.  That stout officer