quite too much of a Hulot.  Valerie has a horror of them all.—­My son-in-law has never chosen to come to this house; why has he given himself such airs as a Mentor, a Spartan, a Puritan, a philanthropist?  Besides, I have squared accounts with my daughter; she has had all her mother’s fortune, and two hundred thousand francs to that.  So I am free to act as I please.—­I shall judge of my son-in-law and Celestine by their conduct on my marriage; as they behave, so shall I. If they are nice to their stepmother, I will receive them.  I am a man, after all!’—­In short, all this rhodomontade!  And an attitude like Napoleon on the column.”

The ten months’ widowhood insisted on by the law had now elapsed some few days since.  The estate of Presles was purchased.  Victorin and Celestine had that very morning sent Lisbeth to make inquiries as to the marriage of the fascinating widow to the Mayor of Paris, now a member of the Common Council of the Department of Seine-et-Oise.

Celestine and Hortense, in whom the ties of affection had been drawn closer since they had lived under the same roof, were almost inseparable.  The Baroness, carried away by a sense of honesty which led her to exaggerate the duties of her place, devoted herself to the work of charity of which she was the agent; she was out almost every day from eleven till five.  The sisters-in-law, united in their cares for the children whom they kept together, sat at home and worked.  They had arrived at the intimacy which thinks aloud, and were a touching picture of two sisters, one cheerful and the other sad.  The less happy of the two, handsome, lively, high-spirited, and clever, seemed by her manner to defy her painful situation; while the melancholy Celestine, sweet and calm, and as equable as reason itself, might have been supposed to have some secret grief.  It was this contradiction, perhaps, that added to their warm friendship.  Each supplied the other with what she lacked.

Seated in a little summer-house in the garden, which the speculator’s trowel had spared by some fancy of the builder’s, who believed that he was preserving these hundred feet square of earth for his own pleasure, they were admiring the first green shoots of the lilac-trees, a spring festival which can only be fully appreciated in Paris when the inhabitants have lived for six months oblivious of what vegetation means, among the cliffs of stone where the ocean of humanity tosses to and fro.

“Celestine,” said Hortense to her sister-in-law, who had complained that in such fine weather her husband should be kept at the Chamber, “I think you do not fully appreciate your happiness.  Victorin is a perfect angel, and you sometimes torment him.”

“My dear, men like to be tormented!  Certain ways of teasing are a proof of affection.  If your poor mother had only been—­I will not say exacting, but always prepared to be exacting, you would not have had so much to grieve over.”