Had Napoleon Chapron been interested in the study of character as deeply as he was in his cotton and his sugarcane, he would have perceived, with affright, the early traces of a sinful nature.  But, on that point, like his son, he was one of those trustful men who did not judge when they loved.  Moreover, Lydia and Florent, to his wounded sensibility of a demi-pariah, formed the only pleasant corner in his life—­were the fresh and youthful comforters of his widowerhood and of his misanthropy.  He cherished them with the idolatry which all great workers entertain for their children, which is one of the most dangerous forms of paternal tenderness; Lydia’s incipient vices were to the planter delightful fancies!  Did she lie?  The excellent man exclaimed:  What an imagination she has!  Was she jealous?  He would sigh, pressing to his broad breast the tiny form:  How sensitive she is!....  The result of that selfish blindness—­for to love children thus is to love them for one’s self and not for them—­was that the girl, at the time of her entrance at Roehampton, was spoiled in the essential traits of her character.  But she was so pretty, she owed to the singular mixture of three races an originality of grace so seductive that only the keen glance of a governess of genius could have discerned, beneath that exquisite exterior, the already marked lines of her character.  Such governesses are rare, still more so at convents than elsewhere.  There was none at Roehampton when Lydia entered that pious haven which was to prove fatal to her, for a reason precisely contrary to that which transformed for Florent the lawns of peaceful Beaumont into a radiant paradise of friendship.

Among the pupils with whom Lydia was to be educated were four young girls from Philadelphia, older than the newcomer by two years, and who, also, had left America for the first time.  They brought with them the unconquerable aversion to negro blood and that wonderful keenness in discovering it, even in the most infinitesimal degree, which distinguishes real Yankees.  Little Lydia Chapron, having been entered as French, they at first hesitated in the face of a suspicion speedily converted into a certainty and that certainty into an aversion, which they could not conceal.  They would not have been children had they not been unfeeling.  They, therefore, began to offer poor Lydia petty affronts.  Convents and colleges resemble other society.  There, too, unjust contempt is like that “ferret of the woods,” which runs from hand to hand and which always returns to its point of setting out.  All the scornful are themselves scorned by some one—­a merited punishment, which does not correct our pride any more than the other punishments which abound in life cure our other faults.  Lydia’s persecutors were themselves the objects of outrages practised by their comrades born in England, on account of certain peculiarities in their language and for the nasal quality of their voices.  The drama was limited, as we can imagine, to a series of insignificant episodes and of which the superintendents only surprised a demi-echo.