In her aunts’ company the simplest actions of rural life acquired for the little girl some deep significance: watering flowers in the garden she seemed to be quenching their thirst, gathering fruit in the orchard she was easing the burden of overladen trees, cutting clover in the paddock she was receiving a gift from bountiful earth. For Aunt Sophie even stones and metals had a voice or resonance. She would place upon a crystal tray various substances differing in form, some round, some flat, and with a little hammer would play upon them curious melodies. While Juliette’s father had brought her up on tales from the _Iliad_, Aunt Sophie, who was an accomplished Latin scholar, told her stories from the _Æneid_, which seemed to her strangely like an echo of her beloved Homer. While her grandmother’s favourite novelist had been Balzac, the aunts talked to her admiringly of George Sand’s peasant romances, and vaguely hinted at longer novels by the same author, which they did not altogether like, but which Juliette would read when she grew up. But the greatest contrast of all was the atmosphere of calm which pervaded Chivres, the harmony in which the aunts and their mother lived, so different from the perpetual wrangling of Chauny and Blérancourt. No wonder that Juliette after two months of this serenity returned to her grandmother a new creature, _in mens sana in corpore sano_. No wonder that the perfect success of this first visit caused it to be repeated annually throughout Juliette’s childhood. Indeed, as time went on, as Juliette grew in years, as the feverish intellectuality of Chauny and Blérancourt intensified, the summer visit to Chivres became more and more necessary. Having done his best to keep his word to his mother-in-law and to permit her to dominate Juliette’s mind until her first communion, once that event was consummated Dr. Lambert felt at liberty to educate his little girl in his own way, in his own ideas, and to make her, as he expressed it, “his daughter according to the spirit as well as according to the flesh.” In his earlier talks with Juliette he had endeavoured to impose a certain reserve upon his expansive nature. Though finding it impossible to exclude his beliefs, his hopes and enthusiasms altogether from their conversation, he had but alluded to them vaguely, saying, “when you are older I will explain to you such and such, when you are older you will understand this or that.” This seed, though sown in an almost infantile mind, had not fallen on barren ground. Not one of these remarks had been lost on Juliette’s precocious and naturally speculative intelligence. She was therefore well prepared to receive with enthusiasm those hopeful doctrines of liberty, fraternity and equality with which her father now set seriously to work to inculcate his eleven-year-old little daughter.