Now he was quite friendly with this singular and loving creature.

Their first conversation had arisen one day when he called to see the Abbe, who was ill.  Seated by the bedside, with spectacles on the alert at the tip of her nose, she was kissing, one by one, the pious prints that illustrated a book wrapped in black cloth.  She begged him to be seated, and then, closing the volume, and replacing her spectacles, she had joined in the conversation; and he had left the room quite amazed by this woman, who addressed the Abbe as “Father,” and spoke quite simply of her intercourse with Jesus and the Saints as if it were a natural thing.  She seemed to live in perfect friendship with them, and spoke of them as of companions with whom she chatted without any embarrassment.

Then the countenance of this woman, whom the priest introduced to him as Madame Celeste Bavoil, was, strange to say, the least of it.  She was thin and upright, but short.  In profile, with her strong Roman nose and set lips, she had the fleshless mask of a dead Caesar; but, seen in front, the sternness of the features was softened into a familiar peasant’s face, and melted into the kindliness of an old nun, quite out of keeping with the solemn strength of her features.

It seemed as though with that clean-cut, imperious nose, small white teeth, and black eyes sparkling with light, busy and inquisitive as those of a mouse, under fine long lashes, the woman ought, notwithstanding her age, to have been handsome; it seemed at least as though the combination of these details would have given the face a stamp of distinction.  Not so; the conclusion was false to the premises; the whole betrayed the combined effect of the details.

“This contradiction,” thought he, “evidently is the result of other peculiarities which nullify the harmony of the more important features; in the first place the thinness of the cheeks and their hue of old wood dotted here and there with freckles, calm stains of the colour of stale bran; then the flat braids of white hair drawn smooth under a frilled cap, and finally the modest dress, a black dress clumsily made, dragging across the bosom, and showing the lines of her stays stamped in relief on the back.

“And perhaps, in her, it is not so much incongruity of features, as a crying contrast between the dress and the face, the head and the body,” thought he.

Altogether, as he summed her up, she was equally suggestive of the chapel and the fields.  Thus she had something of the Sister and something of the peasant.

“Yes,” he went on to himself, “that is very near the mark; but that is not all, for she is both less dignified and less common, inferior and yet more worthy.  Seen from behind she is more like a woman who hires out the chairs in church than like a nun; seen in front she is conspicuously superior to the natives of the soil.  Also it may be noted that when she speaks of the saints she is loftier,