Like all young girls with a tendency to extremes, she drank too deeply of the cup of disillusion.

She fought against reality, and would not bend her neck to the yoke of family and conventions; it was, she felt, too heavy, too hard, too crushing.

She would not listen to the consolations of her father and mother, and tasted a sort of savage pleasure in letting her soul suffer to the utmost.
"Poor Butscha was right," she said one evening.
The words indicate the distance she travelled in a short space of time and in gloomy sadness across the barren plain of reality.

Sadness, when caused by the overgrowth of hope, is a disease,--sometimes a fatal one.
It would be no mean object for physiology to search out in what ways and by what means Thought produces the same internal disorganization as poison; and how it is that despair affects the appetite, destroys the pylorus, and changes all the physical conditions of the strongest life.
Such was the case with Modeste.

In three short days she became the image of morbid melancholy; she did not sing, she could not be made to smile.
Charles Mignon, becoming uneasy at the non-arrival of the two friends, thought of going to fetch them, when, on the evening of the fifth day, he received news of their movements through Latournelle.
Canalis, excessively delighted at the idea of a rich marriage, was determined to neglect nothing that might help him to cut out La Briere, without, however, giving La Briere a chance to reproach him for having violated the laws of friendship.