For nearly twenty years everyone lived there after his or her fancy, the children like the mother.

Everything went on free from control.

In growing to womanhood, Adelaide had retained the strangeness which had been taken for shyness when she was fifteen.

It was not that she was insane, as the people of the Faubourg asserted, but there was a lack of equilibrium between her nerves and her blood, a disorder of the brain and heart which made her lead a life out of the ordinary, different from that of the rest of the world.

She was certainly very natural, very consistent with herself; but in the eyes of the neighbours her consistency became pure insanity.