“It’s a man,” observed the child ruefully, taking in the long aquiline face framed by short thick hair above a tightly buttoned waistcoat. Mathilde Lantier snorted. “You have only to observe how the mouth is of a sympathy and the bosom of a tenderness to know!” “Oh,” said Matilda, “excuse me!” “And this,” continued the woman, “is just one of the so many books she wrote. Ah, _ce roman dépeint une existence malheureuse d’artiste_!” “C-o-n-s-u-e-l-o,” spelled Matilda, bending over the tattered cover. “_C’est ça, ma cherie._” “You talk funny, Grandma.” The grandmother pointed to a line of faded script on the fly-leaf. A long bony finger caressed each word as the foreign staccato of it sharpened the air like thin music: “_Quand on a aimé un homme, il est bien difficile d’aimer Dieu ... c’est si différent!_” There was a silence in which the stately reveries and tingling regrets of an old coquette mingled with the timid wonder of a child. “She said truly,” sighed the withered woman at last, “too truly for peace.” “Peace?” asked the little girl, “and what is that, Grandma?” “A thing a woman longs for but does not want, _ma petite fille_.” Mathilde Gessler returned to Baltimore. A week later a telegram came announcing her very sudden death. But she hadn’t quite died. A goodly fraction of her alternately dreamed and despaired under the olive-tinted skin of her granddaughter, and her granddaughter thought at times she would die of it. And that wasn’t all. There was that unholy booty from Nohant. Matilda longed to achieve the expression which illumined the experienced features of the woman Delacroix painted, and the unintelligible copy of _Consuelo_ with the scribbled sentence on the fly-leaf finally drove her to the little college just outside of Crittenden. It had been rumoured that French was taught there. Doctor Pusey, professor of Romance languages, was a retired Presbyterian. He threw up his hands at mention of the lady’s name. His attitude, combined with her dead grandmother’s enthusiasm, put Matilda into a palpitation that drove her to the little college library ransacking for information. One short paragraph in the encyclopedia rewarded her: Sand, George (1804-1876), the pseudonym of Madame Amandine Lucile Aurore Dudevant, _née_ Dupin, the most prolific authoress in the history of literature and unapproached among women novelists of France. Her life was as strange and adventurous as any of her novels, which for the most part are idealized versions of the multifarious incidents of her life. Matilda fumed at the inadequacy of it. It gave no clue as to why the college curriculum had been cleansed of her. Of course there was that reference to an adventurous life, but that might mean anything from tea parties with kings to lions in Africa. And Delacroix had made her look like a clever Madonna masquerading as a nobleman up to nothing more damnable than courageous benevolences.