She employed her mind on setting traps for her possible lovers, in order to test their real sentiments.

Her nets were so well laid that the luckless suitors were all caught, and succumbed to the test she applied to them without their knowledge.

Mademoiselle Cormon did not study them; she watched them.

A single word said heedlessly, a joke (that she often was unable to understand), sufficed to make her reject an aspirant as unworthy: this one had neither heart nor delicacy; that one told lies, and was not religious; a third only wanted to coin money under the cloak of marriage; another was not of a nature to make a woman happy; here she suspected hereditary gout; there certain immoral antecedents alarmed her.

Like the Church, she required a noble priest at her altar; she even wanted to be married for imaginary ugliness and pretended defects, just as other women wish to be loved for the good qualities they have not, and for imaginary beauties.