“Then,” replied Marien, “I can say nothing,” and he made ready for his sitter the next day, by turning two or three studies of the nude, which might have shocked her, with their faces to the wall.

A foreign language can not be properly acquired unless the learner has great opportunities for conversation.  It therefore became a fixed habit with Fraulein Schult and Jacqueline to keep up a lively stream of talk during their walks, and their discourse was not always about the rain, the fine weather, the things displayed in the shop-windows, nor the historical monuments of Paris, which they visited conscientiously.

What is near the heart is sure to come eventually to the surface in continual tete-a-tete intercourse.  Fraulein Schult, who was of a sentimental temperament, in spite of her outward resemblance to a grenadier, was very willing to allow her companion to draw from her confessions relating to an intended husband, who was awaiting her at Berne, and whose letters, both in prose and verse, were her comfort in her exile.  This future husband was an apothecary, and the idea that he pounded out verses as he pounded his drugs in a mortar, and rolled out rhymes with his pills, sometimes inclined Jacqueline to laugh, but she listened patiently to the plaintive outpourings of her ‘promeneuse’, because she wished to acquire a right to reciprocate by a few half-confidences of her own.  In her turn, therefore, she confided to Fraulein Schult—­moved much as Midas had been, when for his own relief he whispered to the reeds—­that if she were sometimes idle, inattentive, “away off in the moon,” as her instructors told her by way of reproach, it was caused by one ever-present idea, which, ever since she had been able to think or feel, had taken possession of her inmost being—­the idea of being loved some day by somebody as she herself loved.

“Was that somebody a boy of her own age?”

Oh, fie!—­mere boys—­still schoolboys—­could only be looked upon as playfellows or comrades.  Of course she considered Fred—­Fred, for example!—­Frederic d’Argy—­as a brother, but how different he was from her ideal.  Even young men of fashion—­she had seen some of them on Tuesdays—­Raoul Wermant, the one who so distinguished himself as a leader in the ‘german’, or Yvonne’s brother, the officer of chasseurs, who had gained the prize for horsemanship, and others besides these—­seemed to her very commonplace by comparison.  No!—­he whom she loved was a man in the prime of life, well known to fame.  She didn’t care if he had a few white hairs.

“Is he a person of rank?” asked Fraulein Schult, much puzzled.

“Oh! if you mean of noble birth, no, not at all.  But fame is so superior to birth!  There are more ways than one of acquiring an illustrious name, and the name that a man makes for himself is the noblest of all!”