with his hat under his arm and dainty pumps on his feet, enjoying himself, the sky and the trees and Rousseau's God, gentle to all nature and loving to the plants. From time to time fits of impatience, common to children and old men, would overtake him; he would demand a certain number of pages for the next day, and would compel his daughter to sit up half the night. Two or three years passed in this labor, in which Sempronie's eyes were ruined at last. She lived entombed in her father's Vasari, more entirely alone than ever, holding aloof through innate, haughty repugnance from the bourgeois ladies of L'Isle-Adam and their manners _a la Madame Angot_, and too poorly clad to visit at the chateaux. For her, there was no pleasure, no diversion, which was not made wretched and poisoned by her father's eccentricities and fretful humor. He tore up the flowers that she planted secretly in the garden. He would have nothing there but vegetables and he cultivated them himself, putting forth grand utilitarian theories, arguments which might have induced the Convention to convert the Tuileries into a potato field. Her only enjoyment was when her father, at very long intervals, allowed her to entertain one of her two young friends for a week--a week which would have been seven days of paradise to Sempronie, had not her father embittered its joys, its diversions, its fetes, with his always threatening outbreaks, his ill-humor always armed and alert, and his constant fault-finding about trifles--a bottle of eau de Cologne that Sempronie asked for to place in her friend's room, a dish for her dinner, or a place to which she wished to take her.