Page:The Wheel of Time, Collaboration, Owen Wingrave (New York, Harper & Brothers, 1893).djvu/116

108 admired, between their pretty lemon-colored covers, the touching tales of Claude Lorrain. She plies an ingenious, pathetic pen, and has reconciled herself to effort and privation for the sake of her daughter. I say privation, because these distinguished women are poor, receive with great modesty, and have broken with a hundred of those social sanctities that are dearer to French souls than to any others. They have gone down into the market-place, and Paule de Brindes, who is three-and-twenty to-day, and has a happy turn for keeping a water-color liquid, earns a hundred francs here and there. She is not so handsome as her mother, but she has magnificent hair, and what the French call a look of race, and is, or at least was till the other day, a frank and charming young woman. There is some thing exquisite in the way these ladies are earnestly, conscientiously modern. From the moment they accept necessities they accept them all, and poor Madame de Brindes flatters herself that she has made her dowerless daughter one of us others. The girl goes out alone, talks with young