I did not yet understand the tenderness of her feeling toward me. However, it was hardly like the sentiments I held toward her, and I ceased presently to compare them. It was her greatest pleasure to remain at home, to play with Dilette, who laughed and appreciated her little mother always; or to read some “Introduction to a Devoted Life,” or “The Letters of Saint Francis of Sales to Mme. de Chanta” (in which he urges her to light her own fire in the morning rather than make her chambermaid rise before her); or perhaps some other pious work, or some fairy tales and legends, as if she were preparing herself for maternal instruction generally. She delighted too in such simple tales of good folk as gave them the air of having really lived. “Mireille” enchanted her, and “Genevieve, or the Story of a Servant,” and “Dominique” and “Ramuntcho,” and “Nerte,” in which she had underlined these four lines of a benediction which the Pope, traversing a path through the ripe grain, addresses to some workmen in the field: Search peace in field and home-- It is the better part; And drops from labour’s brow Like pearls shall deck the heart. Such an attitude toward life as hers has gone out of style. Nowadays, all women, young and old alike, leave their homes as soon as they are rigged out, fleeing from their firesides as from a pest. They hurry their automobiles in all directions; to teas, to bridge-parties, to soirées that are like exhibitions, to fashionable weddings that seem like parades of the most enterprising dressmakers, to lectures where art and history are popularised; even to the hospitals, where they learn how to care for other people’s children while their own, supposing they have deigned to bear any, are abandoned in the nursery. I urged her to follow their example! “You are not seen about at all. You never go out,” I said. “Do you not care to go out?” “With you? With Dilette?” “No, alone.” She suggested walks in the Bois, which she knew better than the rest of Paris. At first, when Spring came, we had ourselves taken there almost every day. When I gave up going she went with Dilette. She preferred those paths which lead from the lakes to St. James Pond and are never crowded. It was not the Sleeping Woods, but at least there were trees. “Why do we know so many people?” she sighed one day, as she was putting on her hat, vainly hoping that I would forego my plan of sending her out. “It is not your fault if we keep them,” I replied impatiently. At that she departed as quickly as possible, in order to please me. And yet, whenever I returned before she did I was impatient at not finding her there.