second education which most women derive
from a man, but which she derived from herself only.

The natural superiority of a free, sincere spirit, brought up, as it
were in a desert and strengthened by religion, had given her a sort of
untrammelled grandeur and certain needs, to which the provincial world
she lived in offered no sustenance. All books pictured Love to her, and
she sought for the evidence of its existence, but nowhere could she see
the passion of which she read. Love was in her heart, like seeds in the
earth, awaiting the action of the sun. Her deep melancholy, caused by
constant meditation on herself, brought her back by hidden by-ways to
the brilliant dreams of her girlish days. Many a time she must have
lived again that old romantic poem, making herself both the actor and
the subject of it. Again she saw that island bathed in light, flowery,
fragrant, caressing to her soul. Often her pallid eyes wandered around
a salon with piercing curiosity. The men were all like Graslin. She
studied them, and then she seemed to question their wives; but nothing
on the faces of those women revealed an inward anguish like to hers,
and she returned home sad and gloomy and distressed about herself. The
authors she had read in the morning answered to the feelings in her
soul; their thoughts pleased her; but at night she heard only empty
words, not even presented in a lively way,--dull, empty, foolish
conversations in petty local matters, or personalities of no interest to
her. She was often surprised at the heat displayed in discussions which
concerned no feeling or sentiment--to her the essence of existence, the
soul of life.

Often she was seen with fixed eyes, mentally absorbed, thinking no doubt
of the days of her youthful ignorance spent in that chamber full of
harmonies now forever passed away. She felt a horrible repugnance
against dropping into the gulf of pettiness in which the women among
whom she lived were floundering. This repugnance, stamped on her
forehead, on her lips, and ill-disguised, was taken for the insolence
of a parvenue. Madame Graslin began to observe on all faces a certain
coldness; she felt in all remarks an acrimony, the causes of which were
unknown to her, for she had no intimate friend to enlighten or advise
her. Injustice, which angers little minds, brings loftier souls to
question themselves, and communicates a species of humility to them.
Veronique condemned herself, endeavoring to see