but always cotton stockings and leather shoes. On high days she was
dressed in a muslin frock, her hair plainly dressed, and had bronze
kid shoes.

This education, and her own modest demeanor, hid in Rosalie a spirit
of iron. Physiologists and profound observers will tell you, perhaps
to your astonishment, that tempers, characteristics, wit, or genius
reappear in families at long intervals, precisely like what are known
as hereditary diseases. Thus talent, like the gout, sometimes skips
over two generations. We have an illustrious example of this
phenomenon in George Sand, in whom are resuscitated the force, the
power, and the imaginative faculty of the Marechal de Saxe, whose
natural granddaughter she is.

The decisive character and romantic daring of the famous Watteville
had reappeared in the soul of his grand-niece, reinforced by the
tenacity and pride of blood of the Rupts. But these qualities--or
faults, if you will have it so--were as deeply buried in this young
girlish soul, apparently so weak and yielding, as the seething lavas
within a hill before it becomes a volcano. Madame de Watteville alone,
perhaps, suspected this inheritance from two strains. She was so
severe to her Rosalie, that she replied one day to the Archbishop, who
blamed her for being too hard on the child, "Leave me to manage her,
monseigneur. I know her! She has more than one Beelzebub in her skin!"

The Baroness kept all the keener watch over her daughter, because she
considered her honor as a mother to be at stake. After all, she had
nothing else to do. Clotilde de Rupt, at this time five-and-thirty,
and as good as widowed, with a husband who turned egg-cups in every
variety of wood, who set his mind on making wheels with six spokes out