As time went on, Lisbeth had contracted some rather strange old-maidish habits.  For instance, instead of following the fashions, she expected the fashion to accept her ways and yield to her always out-of-date notions.  When the Baroness gave her a pretty new bonnet, or a gown in the fashion of the day, Betty remade it completely at home, and spoilt it by producing a dress of the style of the Empire or of her old Lorraine costume.  A thirty-franc bonnet came out a rag, and the gown a disgrace.  On this point, Lisbeth was as obstinate as a mule; she would please no one but herself and believed herself charming; whereas this assimilative process—­harmonious, no doubt, in so far as that it stamped her for an old maid from head to foot—­made her so ridiculous, that, with the best will in the world, no one could admit her on any smart occasion.

This refractory, capricious, and independent spirit, and the inexplicable wild shyness of the woman for whom the Baron had four times found a match—­an employe in his office, a retired major, an army contractor, and a half-pay captain—­while she had refused an army lacemaker, who had since made his fortune, had won her the name of the Nanny Goat, which the Baron gave her in jest.  But this nickname only met the peculiarities that lay on the surface, the eccentricities which each of us displays to his neighbors in social life.  This woman, who, if closely studied, would have shown the most savage traits of the peasant class, was still the girl who had clawed her cousin’s nose, and who, if she had not been trained to reason, would perhaps have killed her in a fit of jealousy.

It was only her knowledge of the laws and of the world that enabled her to control the swift instinct with which country folk, like wild men, reduce impulse to action.  In this alone, perhaps, lies the difference between natural and civilized man.  The savage has only impulse; the civilized man has impulses and ideas.  And in the savage the brain retains, as we may say, but few impressions, it is wholly at the mercy of the feeling that rushes in upon it; while in the civilized man, ideas sink into the heart and change it; he has a thousand interests and many feelings, where the savage has but one at a time.  This is the cause of the transient ascendency of a child over its parents, which ceases as soon as it is satisfied; in the man who is still one with nature, this contrast is constant.  Cousin Betty, a savage of Lorraine, somewhat treacherous too, was of this class of natures, which are commoner among the lower orders than is supposed, accounting for the conduct of the populace during revolutions.