Rosine was silent according to her habit; it was not easy to know her thoughts as she listened, bent forward, her hands folded and her arms leaning on the table.  Some natures seem made to receive, like the earth which opens itself silently to every seed.  Many seeds fall and remain dormant; none can tell which will bring forth fruit.  The soul of the young girl was of this kind; her face did not reflect the words of the reader as did Maxime’s mobile features, but the slight flush on her cheek and the moist glance of her eyes under their drooping lids showed inward ardour and feeling.  She looked like those Florentine pictures of the Virgin stirred by the magical salutation of the Archangel.  Clerambault saw it all and as he glanced around his little circle his eye rested with special delight on the fair bending head which seemed to feel his look.

On this July evening these four people were united in a bond of affection and tranquil happiness of which the central point was the father, the idol of the family.

He knew that he was their idol, and by a rare exception this knowledge did not spoil him, for he had such joy in loving, so much affection to spread far and wide that it seemed only natural that he should be loved in return; he was really like an elderly child.  After a life of ungilded mediocrity he had but recently come to be known, and though the one experience had not given him pain, he delighted in the other.  He was over fifty without seeming to be aware of it, for if there were some white threads in his big fair moustache,—­like an ancient Gaul’s,—­his heart was as young as those of his children.  Instead of going with the stream of his generation, he met each new wave; the best of life to him was the spring of youth constantly renewed, and he never troubled about the contradictions into which he was led by this spirit always in reaction against that which had preceded it.  These inconsistencies were fused together in his mind, which was more enthusiastic than logical, and filled by the beauty which he saw all around him.  Add to this the milk of human kindness, which did not mix well with his aesthetic pantheism, but which was natural to him.

He had made himself the exponent of noble human ideas, sympathising with advanced parties, the oppressed, the people—­of whom he knew little, for he was thoroughly of the middle-class, full of vague, generous theories.  He also adored crowds and loved to mingle with them, believing that in this way he joined himself to the All-Soul, according to the fashion at that time in intellectual circles.  This fashion, as not infrequently happens, emphasised a general tendency of the day; humanity turning to the swarm-idea.  The most sensitive among human insects,—­artists and thinkers,—­were the first to show these symptoms, which in them seemed a sort of pose, so that the general conditions of which they were a symptom were lost sight of.