From the irksome routine of lessons, however, the child turned to the freedom and wild enjoyment of outdoor life. She had as companions in her games a boy and girl who were inmates of the home, the former her half-brother, and the latter Ursule, who in later years was her faithful servant. With these and the peasant children of the neighborhood, she was able to pass numberless hours face to face with Nature, in whose manifold forms she took unbounded delight. Gathered about the fires they kindled in the meadows, they would romp and dance, or vary the pleasure by story-telling. When the hemp-dressers assembled at the farm of an evening, Aurore took the lead in the stories that were told; but she tells us that she could never succeed in evoking one of the visions with which the peasants were familiar. The _great beast_ had appeared to them all, at least once; but she experienced only the excitement of disturbed nerves. When eight years old, the child had acquired a fair knowledge of her native language, and composition and the cultivation of style were now being taught her, added to which were such subjects as Greek, prosody, and botany; the natural result of which was a brain taxed with details, but lacking in a clear perception of the ideas and principles sought to be established. Yet the imaginative mind was alert; it was storing up a fund of fancy that the future could draw upon almost limitlessly. The conflict between her mother and her grandmother was also exerting a formative influence on the child's mind in cooperation with her tenderness of heart. She could ill bear the grandmother's calm but dignified reproaches, though she entertained for her no little affection. Constantly reminded of her aristocratic claims, and conscious of the hardly veiled contempt in which her mother was held by the elder Madame Dupin, she grew to despise the pretensions of caste, and her leanings became thoroughly democratic, as if the spontaneous germination of her sorrows. Her mother's angry outbreaks caused her not a tithe of the sorrow that she endured at the cold reproofs of her grandmother; hence, it was apparent to the latter that Aurore's love for her mother was greater than that for herself. She was, however, bent on securing the full love of her granddaughter and on obtaining sole guardianship. To her she looked as her heir, on whom it was incumbent to espouse the prejudices of the aristocracy.