This gave rise to the only quarrel the sisters had had in their lives. Félicité resented the disgrace that Aline was going to put on the family name by degenerating into a giver of private lessons, when she might have secured forty pounds a year for ever by a few years’ dutiful attendance on a brave man who had fought his country’s battles. “Well, if you can find me a warrior of ninety,” said the younger sister, a month before she left S. Denis, “I’m not sure that he might not persuade me; but I never will capitulate under ninety; I couldn’t trust a man under that; they live for ever when they marry between sixty and eighty, and there are no tyrants like them; now, I would do my duty as a kind wife for a year or so, but I’ve no notion of taking a situation as nurse for fifteen or twenty years, and that’s what one gets by marrying a young man of seventy or thereabouts.” Félicité urged her own case as a proof to the contrary. Général de Chanoir was only sixty‐eight when she married him, and he retired at seventy. Aline maintained, however, that this was the one exception necessary to prove the rule to the present generation, and as no eligible _parti_ of fourscore and ten presented itself before she left school, she held to her resolve, and started at once as a teacher. The sisters took an apartment together, if two rooms, a cabinet de toilette, and a cooking‐range in a dark passage, dignified by the name of kitchen, can be called an apartment, and for six years they lived very happily. Mme. de Chanoir was small and fair, and very distinguished‐looking. She had never known a day’s illness in her life, but she was a hypochondriac. She believed herself afflicted with a spine disease, which necessitated reclining all day long on the sofa in a Louis Quinze dressing‐gown and a Dubarry cap. Aline was tall and dark, not exactly pretty, but indescribably piquant. Without being delicate, her health was far less robust than her sister’s; but she was blessed with indomitable spirits and a fund of energy that carried her through a variety of aches and pains, and often bore her successfully through her round of daily work when another would have given in.