Miss Amelia Bear was the living proof of such a possibility. Miss Amelia Bear had had a very hard time of it all her life long. She was the poor daughter of a poor village minister, and began at fourteen her thorny career as a governess in noble country families. In those days she was very pretty, and therefore exposed to many temptations; but her prudence and her cleverness had helped her to escape from all dangers, till she was old enough to be left alone, and to procure for herself a kind of independence by establishing a school upon the savings of long years and the presents she had occasionally received. Her honorable character was known to everybody; and this, and the experience she had gained in the field of education, justified such an enterprise, while her numerous relations to noble families promised almost certain success. She preferred the nobility, because the nobility preferred her; and she hesitated to accept girls of other families, because she was sure to lose or not to receive for one such boarder, six from the nobility. Nevertheless she gave up the principle whenever a special case seemed to require an exception from the rule. Thus it had been with Sophie Roban. The privy councillor was the physician of the institution, and Miss Bear was under great obligations to him. Even her noble patrons, therefore, understood perfectly why she could not well refuse the widowed privy councillor, when he asked her to take for a few years a mother's place to his orphaned child. Her relation to Sophie Roban was the best proof of the exaggeration which had given rise to so many fables about the dragon nature of Miss Bear. She had become a real mother to the motherless girl; she had guarded and protected her against every bodily and mental danger, not in order to earn her compensation honestly, nor for the sake of the reputation of her school, but because she loved the girl with her whole heart, as if she had been her own. Malicious people went so far as to say that she had not only raised but also spoiled the girl, and it could not be denied that Sophie--little Sophie, as the She Bear said--could dare what no other boarder, not even Emily von Breesen, who was at the same time there, and who passed for absolutely untamable, would ever have ventured to do. Sophie could interrupt Miss Bear in the most violent philippic against any wrong-doer who had done something especially horrible, _e. g._, cutting round holes in the curtains for the purpose of peeping at the people who passed by the house, and could fall upon her neck and say: Miss Mal, Miss Mal, I would not be so very angry if I were you! Sophie could at all times freely enter her study--that mysterious adytum to which the young ladies came with fear and trembling, and where the dispatches to their parents were prepared, and all their letters, coming and going, were subjected to rigorous scrutiny! Sophie could do what she chose.