Some women seem to me like statues, and some like pictures. The latter fascinate you at once, compelling your admiration even on the first glance, while you pass by the former with a mere cold and critical approval. But every man who cares for art must have experienced how the influence of the model or the marble grows on him day by day. How, time after time, fresh beauties seem to spring beneath his gaze as if his very worship called them into life, and how, when he has got the masterpiece by heart, and sees every curve of the outline, every turn of the chisel in his dreams, he no longer wonders that it was not a painter, but a sculptor, who languished to death in hopeless adoration of his handiwork. These statue-women move, in no majestic march, over the necks of captive thousands to the strains of all kinds of music, but stand in their leafy, shadowy nooks apart, teaching a man to love them by degrees, and he never forgets the lesson, nor would he if he could. It is scarcely necessary to say that the Marquise loved her daughter very dearly. For years, the child had occupied the first place in her warm impassioned heart. To send Cerise away was the first lesson in self-sacrifice the proud and prosperous lady had ever been forced to learn, and many a tear it used to cost her, when her ball-dress had been folded up and Célandine dismissed for the night. Nor, indeed, was the Quadroon’s pillow quite dry when first she lost her nursling; and long after Cerise slept calmly and peacefully between those quiet convent walls, far off in Normandy, the two women would lie broad awake, calling to remembrance the blue eyes and the brown curls and the pretty ways of their darling, till their very hearts ached with longing to look on her once more. Now, since mademoiselle had returned, the Marquise thought she loved her better than ever, and perhaps all the feelings and impulses of a heart not too well disciplined had of late been called into stronger play. [Illustration: “I LIKE GOING OUT SO MUCH, MAMMA.” (_Page 169._)] Madame de Montmirail threw herself back in her chair with an exclamation of pleasure, for the cool, soft breeze lifted the hair from her temples, and stirred the delicate lace edging on her bosom. “It is delightful, my child!” she said, “after the heat of to-day, which was suffocating. And we have nothing for to-night, I thank the saints with my whole heart! Absolutely nothing! Neither ball, nor concert, nor opera (for I could not sit out another of Cavalli’s), nor even a horrid reception at the Luxembourg. This is what I call veritable repose.” Like all people with a tinge of southern blood, the Marquise cried out at the slightest increase of temperature. Like all fashionable ladies, she professed to consider those gaieties without which she could not live, duty, but martyrdom.