When she had nothing else to clean, the strange woman would attack her rings, her watch-chain, her brooches, scrubbing the cameos and pearls, and, by dint of polishing the combination of her own name and her husband’s, she had effaced all the letters of both.  Her fixed idea followed her to Savigny.  She picked up dead branches in the paths, scratched the moss from the benches with the end of her umbrella, and would have liked to dust the leaves and sweep down the old trees; and often, when in the train, she looked with envy at the little villas standing in a line along the track, white and clean, with their gleaming utensils, the pewter ball, and the little oblong gardens, which resemble drawers in a bureau.  Those were her ideal of a country-house.

M. Fromont, who came only occasionally and was always absorbed by his business affairs, enjoyed Savigny little more than she.  Claire alone felt really at home in that lovely park.  She was familiar with its smallest shrub.  Being obliged to provide her own amusements, like all only children, she had become attached to certain walks, watched the flowers bloom, had her favorite path, her favorite tree, her favorite bench for reading.  The dinner-bell always surprised her far away in the park.  She would come to the table, out of breath but happy, flushed with the fresh air.  The shadow of the hornbeams, stealing over that youthful brow, had imprinted a sort of gentle melancholy there, and the deep, dark green of the ponds, crossed by vague rays, was reflected in her eyes.

Those lovely surroundings had in very truth shielded her from the vulgarity and the abjectness of the persons about her.  M. Gardinois might deplore in her presence, for hours at a time, the perversity of tradesmen and servants, or make an estimate of what was being stolen from him each month, each week, every day, every minute; Madame Fromont might enumerate her grievances against the mice, the maggots, dust and dampness, all desperately bent upon destroying her property, and engaged in a conspiracy against her wardrobes; not a word of their foolish talk remained in Claire’s mind.  A run around the lawn, an hour’s reading on the river-bank, restored the tranquillity of that noble and intensely active mind.

Her grandfather looked upon her as a strange being, altogether out of place in his family.  As a child she annoyed him with her great, honest eyes, her straightforwardness on all occasions, and also because he did not find in her a second edition of his own passive and submissive daughter.

“That child will be a proud chit and an original, like her father,” he would say in his ugly moods.

How much better he liked that little Chebe girl who used to come now and then and play in the avenues at Savigny!  In her, at least, he detected the strain of the common people like himself, with a sprinkling of ambition and envy, suggested even in those early days by a certain little smile at the corner of the mouth.  Moreover, the child exhibited an ingenuous amazement and admiration in presence of his wealth, which flattered his parvenu pride; and sometimes, when he teased her, she would break out with the droll phrases of a Paris gamine, slang redolent of the faubourgs, seasoned by her pretty, piquant face, inclined to pallor, which not even superficiality could deprive of its distinction.  So he never had forgotten her.