but without apparent effort, very pleasant for poor human egotism, because they dispense from all gratitude and hardly make themselves felt, so light is their hand.  She was not the courageous daughter who works to support her parents, gives private lessons from morning to night, forgets in the excitement of a profession all the troubles of the household.  No, she had understood her task in a different sense, a sedentary bee restricting her cares to the hive, without once humming out of doors in the open air among the flowers.  A thousand functions:  tailoress, milliner, mender of clothes, bookkeeper also for M. Joyeuse, who, incapable of all responsibility, left to her the free disposal of their means, to be pianoforte-teacher, governess.

As it happens in families that have been in a good position, Aline, as the eldest daughter, had been educated at one of the best boarding-schools in Paris.  Elise had been with her there for two years; but the last two, born too late, and sent to small day-schools in the locality, had all their studies yet to complete, and this was no easy matter, the youngest laughing upon every occasion from sheer good health, warbling like a lark intoxicated with the delight of green corn, and flying away far out of sight of desk and exercises, while Mlle. Henriette, ever haunted by her ideas of grandeur, her love of luxurious things, took to work hardly less unwillingly.  This young person of fifteen, to whom her father had transmitted something of his imaginative faculties, was already arranging her life in advance and declared formally that she should marry one of the nobility, and would never have more than three children:  “A boy to inherit the name and two little girls—­so as to be able to dress them alike.”

“Yes, that’s right,” Bonne Maman would say, “you shall dress them alike.  In the meantime, let us attend to our participles a little.”

But the one who caused the most concern was Elise, with her examination taken thrice without success, always failing in history and preparing herself anew, seized by a deep fear and a mistrust of herself which made her carry about with her everywhere and open every moment that unfortunate history of France, in the omnibus, in the street, even at the luncheon-table; she was already a grown girl and very pretty, and she no longer possessed that little mechanical memory of childhood wherein dates and events lodge themselves for the whole of one’s life.  Beset by other preoccupations, the lesson was forgotten in an instant, despite the apparent application of the pupil, with her long lashes fringing her eyes, her curls sweeping over the pages, and her rosy mouth animated by a little quiver of attention, repeating ten times in succession:  “Louis, surnamed le Hutin, 1314-1316; Philip V, surnamed the Long, 1316-1322.  Ah, Bonne Maman, it’s no good; I shall never know them.”  Whereupon Bonne Maman would come to her assistance, help her to concentrate her attention, to store up