Charles could not have hoped for an easier case.  Then calling to mind the devices of his masters at the bedsides of patients, he comforted the sufferer with all sorts of kindly remarks, those Caresses of the surgeon that are like the oil they put on bistouries.  In order to make some splints a bundle of laths was brought up from the cart-house.  Charles selected one, cut it into two pieces and planed it with a fragment of windowpane, while the servant tore up sheets to make bandages, and Mademoiselle Emma tried to sew some pads.  As she was a long time before she found her work-case, her father grew impatient; she did not answer, but as she sewed she pricked her fingers, which she then put to her mouth to suck them.  Charles was surprised at the whiteness of her nails.  They were shiny, delicate at the tips, more polished than the ivory of Dieppe, and almond-shaped.  Yet her hand was not beautiful, perhaps not white enough, and a little hard at the knuckles; besides, it was too long, with no soft inflections in the outlines.  Her real beauty was in her eyes.  Although brown, they seemed black because of the lashes, and her look came at you frankly, with a candid boldness.

The bandaging over, the doctor was invited by Monsieur Rouault himself to “pick a bit” before he left.

Charles went down into the room on the ground floor.  Knives and forks and silver goblets were laid for two on a little table at the foot of a huge bed that had a canopy of printed cotton with figures representing Turks.  There was an odour of iris-root and damp sheets that escaped from a large oak chest opposite the window.  On the floor in corners were sacks of flour stuck upright in rows.  These were the overflow from the neighbouring granary, to which three stone steps led.  By way of decoration for the apartment, hanging to a nail in the middle of the wall, whose green paint scaled off from the effects of the saltpetre, was a crayon head of Minerva in gold frame, underneath which was written in Gothic letters “To dear Papa.”

First they spoke of the patient, then of the weather, of the great cold, of the wolves that infested the fields at night.

Mademoiselle Rouault did not at all like the country, especially now that she had to look after the farm almost alone.  As the room was chilly, she shivered as she ate.  This showed something of her full lips, that she had a habit of biting when silent.

Her neck stood out from a white turned-down collar.  Her hair, whose two black folds seemed each of a single piece, so smooth were they, was parted in the middle by a delicate line that curved slightly with the curve of the head; and, just showing the tip of the ear, it was joined behind in a thick chignon, with a wavy movement at the temples that the country doctor saw now for the first time in his life.  The upper part of her cheek was rose-coloured.  She had, like a man, thrust in between two buttons of her bodice a tortoise-shell eyeglass.