“When I think of the pains my poor cousin de Nailles took to impress upon us all that he was making what is called a ‘mariage raisonnable’!  Well, if a man wants a wife who is going to set up her own notions, her own customs, he had better marry a poor girl without fortune!  This one will simply ruin him.  My dear, I am continually amazed at the way people are living whose incomes I know to the last sou.  What an example for Jacqueline!  Extravagance, fast living, elegant self-indulgence....  Did you observe the Baronne’s gown?—­of rough woolen stuff.  She told some one it was the last creation of Doucet, and you know what that implies!  His serge costs more than one of our velvet gowns . . . .  And then her artistic tastes, her bric-a brac!  Her salon looks like a museum or a bazaar.  I grant you it makes a very pretty setting for her and all her coquetries.  But in my time respectable women were contented with furniture covered with red or yellow silk damask furnished by their upholsterers.  They didn’t go about trying to hunt up the impossible.  ’On ne cherche pas midi a quatorze heures’.  You hold, as I do, to the old fashions, though you are not nearly so old, my dear Elise, and Jacqueline’s mother thought as we think.  She would say that her daughter is being very badly brought up.  To be sure, all young creatures nowadays are the same.  Parents, on a plea of tenderness, keep them at home, where they get spoiled among grown people, when they had much better have the same kind of education that has succeeded so well with Giselle; bolts on the garden-gates, wholesome seclusion, the company of girls of their own age, a great regularity of life, nothing which stimulates either vanity or imagination.  That is the proper way to bring up girls without notions, girls who will let themselves be married without opposition, and are satisfied with the state of life to which Providence may be pleased to call them.  For my part, I am enchanted with the ladies in the Rue de Monsieur, and, what is more, Giselle is very happy among them; to hear her talk you would suppose she was quite ready to take the veil.  Of course, that is a mere passing fancy.  But fancies of that sort are never dangerous, they have nothing in common with those that are passing nowadays through most girls’ brains.  Having ’a day!’—­what a foolish notion:  And then to let little girls take part in it, even in a corner of the room.  I’ll wager that, though her skirts are half way up her legs, and her hair is dressed like a baby’s, that that little de Nailles is less of a child than my granddaughter, who has been brought up by the Benedictines.  You say that she probably does not understand all that goes on around her.  Perhaps not, but she breathes it in.  It’s poison-that’s what it is!”

There was a good deal of truth in this harsh picture, although it contained considerable exaggeration.