After that she returned to Limouzin only long enough to keep up her popularity, though, with touching resignation, she frequently offered to spend the summer at Grandchaux, even if the consequences should be her death, like that of Pia in the Maremma.  Her husband, of course, peremptorily set his face against such self-sacrifice.

The facilities for Jacqueline’s education were increased by their settling down as residents of Paris.  Madame de Nailles superintended the instruction of her stepdaughter with motherly solicitude, seconded, however, by a ‘promeneuse’, or walking-governess, which left her free to fulfil her own engagements in the afternoons.  The walking-governess is a singular modern institution, intended to supply the place of the too often inconvenient daily governess of former times.  The necessary qualifications of such a person are that she should have sturdy legs, and such knowledge of some foreign language as will enable her during their walks to converse in it with her pupil.  Fraulein Schult, who came from one of the German cantons of Switzerland, was an ideal ‘promeneuse’.  She never was tired and she was well-informed.  The number of things that could be learned from her during a walk was absolutely incredible.

Madame de Nailles, therefore, after a time, gave up to her, not without apparent regret, the duty of accompanying Jacqueline, while she herself fulfilled those duties to society which the most devoted of mothers can not wholly avoid; but the stepmother and stepdaughter were always to be seen together at mass at one o’clock; together they attended the Cours (that system of classes now so much in vogue) and also the weekly instruction given in the catechism; and if Madame de Nailles, when, at night, she told her husband all she had been doing for Jacqueline during the day (she never made any merit of her zeal for the child’s welfare), added:  “I left Jacqueline in this place or in that, where Mademoiselle Schult was to call for her,” M. de Nailles showed no disposition to ask questions, for he well understood that his wife felt a certain delicacy in telling him that she had been to pay a brief visit to her own relatives, who, she knew, were distasteful to him.  He had, indeed, very soon discerned in them a love of intrigue, a desire to get the most they could out of him, and a disagreeable propensity to parasitism.  With the consummate tact she showed in everything she did, Madame de Nailles kept her own family in the background, though she never neglected them.  She was always doing them little services, but she knew well that there were certain things about them that could not but be disagreeable to her husband.  M. de Nailles knew all this, too, and respected his wife’s affection for her family.  He seldom asked her where she had been during the day.  If he had she would have answered, with a sigh:  “I went to see my mother while Jacqueline was taking her dancing-lesson, and before she went to her singing-master.”