So it came about that at ten years old she scarcely knew how to read and could handle the boasting-tool with marvellous skill.  Ruys would have liked to keep always with him this child whom he never felt to be in the way, a member of the great brotherhood from her earliest years.  But it was pitiful to see the little girl amid the free behaviour of the frequenters of the house, the constant going and coming of the models, the discussions of an art, so to speak, entirely physical, and even at the noisy Sunday dinner-parties, sitting among five or six women, to all of whom her father spoke familiarly.  There were actresses, dancers or singers, who, after dinner, would settle themselves down to smoke with their elbows on the table absorbed in the indecent stories so keenly relished by their host.  Fortunately, childhood is protected by a resisting candour, by an enamel over which all impurities glide.  Felicia became noisy, turbulent, ill-behaved, but without being touched by all that passed over her little soul so near to earth.

Every year, in the summer, she used to go to stay for a few days with her godmother, Constance Crenmitz, the elder Crenmitz, whom all Europe had called for so long “the famous dancer,” and who lived in peaceful retirement at Fontainebleau.

The arrival of the “little demon” used to bring into the life of the old dancer an element of disturbance from which she had afterward all the year to recover.  The frights which the child caused her by her daring in climbing, in jumping, in riding, all the passionate transports of her wild nature made this visit for her at once delicious and terrible; delicious for she adored Felicia, the one family tie that remained to this poor old salamander in retirement after thirty years of fluttering in the glare of the footlights; terrible, for the demon used to upset without pity the dancer’s house, decorated, carefully ordered, perfumed, like her dressing-room at the opera, and adorned with a museum of souvenirs dated from every stage in the world.

Constance Crenmitz was the one feminine element in Felicia’s childhood.  Futile, limited in mind, she had at least a coquettish taste, agile fingers that knew how to sew, to embroider, to arrange things, to leave in every corner of the room their dainty and individual trace.  She alone undertook to train up the wild young plant, and to awaken with discretion the woman in this strange being on whom cloaks, furs, everything elegant devised by fashion, seemed to take odd folds or look curiously awkward.

It was the dancer again—­in what neglect must she not have lived, this little Ruys—­who, triumphing over the paternal selfishness, insisted upon a necessary separation, when Felicia was twelve or thirteen years old; and she took also the responsibility of finding a suitable school, a school which she selected of deliberate purpose, very comfortable and very respectable, right at the upper end of an airy road, occupying a roomy, old-world building surrounded by high walls, big trees, a sort of convent without its constraint and contempt of serious studies.