Thus attired, Pierrette was the most enchanting little girl in all Provins.  On Sunday, after church, all the ladies kissed her; Mesdames Tiphaine, Garceland, Galardon, Julliard, and the rest fell in love with the sweet little Breton girl.  This enthusiasm was deeply flattering to old Sylvie’s self-love; she regarded it as less due to Pierrette than to her own benevolence.  She ended, however, in being affronted by her cousin’s success.  Pierrette was constantly invited out, and Sylvie allowed her to go, always for the purpose of triumphing over “those ladies.”  Pierrette was much in demand for games or little parties and dinners with their own little girls.  She had succeeded where the Rogrons had failed; and Mademoiselle Sylvie soon grew indignant that Pierrette was asked to other children’s houses when those children never came to hers.  The artless little thing did not conceal the pleasure she found in her visits to these ladies, whose affectionate manners contrasted strangely with the harshness of her two cousins.  A mother would have rejoiced in the happiness of her little one, but the Rogrons had taken Pierrette for their own sakes, not for hers; their feelings, far from being parental, were dyed in selfishness and a sort of commercial calculation.

The handsome outfit, the fine Sunday dresses, and the every-day frocks were the beginning of Pierrette’s troubles.  Like all children free to amuse themselves, who are accustomed to follow the dictates of their own lively fancies, she was very hard on her clothes, her shoes, and above all on those embroidered drawers.  A mother when she reproves her child thinks only of the child; her voice is gentle; she does not raise it unless driven to extremities, or when the child is much in fault.  But here, in this great matter of Pierrette’s clothes, the cousins’ money was the first consideration; their interests were to be thought of, not the child’s.  Children have the perceptions of the canine race for the sentiments of those who rule them; they know instinctively whether they are loved or only tolerated.  Pure and innocent hearts are more distressed by shades of difference than by contrasts; a child does not understand evil, but it knows when the instinct of the good and the beautiful which nature has implanted in it is shocked.  The lectures which Pierrette now drew upon herself on propriety of behavior, modesty, and economy were merely the corollary of the one theme, “Pierrette will ruin us.”

These perpetual fault-findings, which were destined to have a fatal result for the poor child, brought the two celibates back to the old beaten track of their shop-keeping habits, from which their removal to Provins had parted them, and in which their natures were now to expand and flourish.  Accustomed in the old days to rule and to make inquisitions, to order about and reprove their clerks sharply, Rogron and his sister had actually suffered for want of victims.  Little minds need to practise despotism to relieve their nerves, just as great souls thirst for equality in friendship to exercise their hearts.  Narrow natures expand by persecuting as much as others through beneficence; they prove their power over their fellows by cruel tyranny as others do by loving kindness; they simply go the way their temperaments drive them.  Add to this the propulsion of self-interest and you may read the enigma of most social matters.