was clear with the serenity of a young girl who knows no care. Her
liquid blue eyes, bathed in rich fluid, expressed the tender grace of
a glowing happiness. If that happiness took from her head the poetry
which painters insist on giving to their pictures my making them a
shade too pensive, the vague physical languor of a young girl who has
never left her mother's side made up for it, and gave her a species of
ideality. Notwithstanding the graceful lines of her figure, she was
strongly built. Her feet betrayed the peasant origin of her father and
her own defects of race, as did the redness of her hands, the sign of
the thoroughly bourgeois life. Sooner or later she would grow stout.
She had caught the sentiment of dress from the elegant young women who
came to the shop, and had learned from them certain movements of the
head, certain ways of speaking and of moving; and she could play the
well-bred woman in a way that turned the heads of all the young men,
especially the clerks, in whose eyes she appeared truly distinguished.
Popinot swore that he would have no other wife than Cesarine. The
liquid brightness of that eye, which a look, or a tone of reproach,
might cause to overflow in tears, was all that kept him to a sense of
masculine superiority. The charming girl inspired love without leaving
time to ask whether she had mind enough to make it durable. But of
what value is the thing they call in Paris _mind_ to a class whose
principal element of happiness is virtue and good sense?

In her moral qualities Cesarine was like her mother, somewhat bettered
by the superfluities of education; she loved music, drew the Madonna
della Sedia in chalk, and read the works of Mmes. Cottin and
Riccoboni, of Bernadin de Saint-Pierre, Fenelon, and Racine. She was
never seen behind the counter with her mother except for a few moments
before sitting down to dinner, or on some special occasion when she
replaced her. Her father and mother, like all persons who have risen