The sight of a cloudless sky, the fragrance of flowers, a turn in the garden, arm in arm,--these were their joys.

The finishing of a piece of embroidery was to them a source of enjoyment.
Their mother's social circle, far from opening resources to their hearts or stimulating their minds, only darkened their ideas and depressed them; it was made up of rigid old women, withered and graceless, whose conversation turned on the differences which distinguished various preachers and confessors, on their own petty indispositions, on religious events insignificant even to the "Quotidienne" or "l'Ami de la Religion." As for the men who appeared in the Comtesse de Granville's salon, they extinguished any possible torch of love, so cold and sadly resigned were their faces.

They were all of an age when mankind is sulky and fretful, and natural sensibilities are chiefly exercised at table and on the things relating to personal comfort.

Religious egotism had long dried up those hearts devoted to narrow duties and entrenched behind pious practices.

Silent games of cards occupied the whole evening, and the two young girls under the ban of that Sanhedrim enforced by maternal severity, came to hate the dispiriting personages about them with their hollow eyes and scowling faces.
On the gloom of this life one sole figure of a man, that of a music-master, stood vigorously forth.