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Rh to her that nobody and nothing were worthy of her faith. Her father's riches attracted the envious, cunning, deceitful, from the whole city. She was surrounded by avaricious men, by liars, by flatterers; every word that was said to her was calculated with a view to her father's millions.

Her thoughts kept growing more serious. She began to get interested in the general questions arising from the wealth that troubled her so much, as well as in those arising from the poverty which troubled others. Her father gave her plenty of pin money, but like any other good woman she used it in helping the poor. But she read and thought and began to notice that such help as she could give did less good than she had reason to expect. She began to see that she was constantly deceived by feigned or knavish poverty; that people worthy of aid, able to make good use of such money, scarcely ever got any solid good from it; it lifts them temporarily out of their poverty, but in half a year or a year those people are in the same situation again. She began to think: "Why should money ruin people? Why does this importunate poverty never leave the poor? And why are there so many poor who are as unreasonable and bad as the rich?"

She was a person of imagination, but her imaginations were gentle, like her character, and there was just as little brilliancy about them as there was in herself. Her favorite author was George Sand, but she never imagined herself to be Lélia or Indiana or Cavalcanti or Consuélo; she more often imagined herself to be Jeannette or Geneviève. Geneviève was her favorite heroine. Here she is going through the field and is gathering flowers which will serve as models of her handiwork; here she meets Andrè—such quiet meetings! Here they discover that they love each other; such were her imaginations, and she knew that they were only imaginations. And she loved to dream how enviable was the lot of Miss Nightingale, that quiet, unostentatious little woman, of whom scarcely anything was known except that she was loved by all England. Was she young? Was she rich or poor? Was she happy or unhappy? About this nothing is said, about this nothing is thought; every one blesses the little woman, who was a ministering angel in the English hospitals of the Krimea and Skutari, and who at the end of the war, while returning to her native land with hundreds saved by her, still continued to take care of the sick.