ot wish to have Elinor blush before her;
she did want, however much of a relief it might be, to help her over the
humiliation, which lies in opening the inmost recesses of one's soul to
the gaze of another. On the contrary the more difficult it became for
both, the more she was pleased, that the aristocracy of soul which
she herself possessed was repeated in her young daughter in a certain
healthy inflexibility.

Once upon a time--it was a time many, many years ago, when she herself
had been an eighteen-year old girl, she had loved with all her soul,
with every sense in her body, every living hope, every thought. It was
not to be, could not be. He had had nothing to offer except his loyalty
which would have involved the test of an endlessly long engagement, and
there were circumstances in her home which could not wait. So she had
taken the one whom they had given her, the one who was master over these
circumstances. They were married, then came children: Tage, the son,
who was with her in Avignon, and the daughter, who sat beside her,
Everything had turned out so much better than she could have hoped for,
both easier and more friendly. Eight years it lasted, then the husband
died, and she mourned him with a sincere heart. She had learned to love
his fine, thin-blooded nature which with a tense, egotistic, almost
morbid love loved whatever belonged to it by ties of relationship or
family, and cared nought for anything in all the great world outside,
except for what they thought, what their opinion was--nothing else.
After her husband's death she had lived chiefly for her children, but
she had not devoted herself exclusively to them; she had taken part in
social life, as was natural for so young and well-to-do a widow; and now
her son was twenty-one years old and she lacked not many days of forty.
But she was still beautiful. There was not a gray thread in her heavy
dark-blonde hair, not a wrinkle round her large, courageous eyes, and
her figure was slender with well-balanced fullness. The strong, fine
lines of her features were accentuated by the darker more deeply colored
complexion which the years had given her; the smile of her widely
sweeping lips was very sweet; an almost enigmatical youth in the dewy
luminosity of her brown eyes softened and mellowed everything again. And
yet she also had the round fullness of cheek, the strong-willed chin of
a mature woman.

"That surely is Tage coming," said Mrs. Fonss to her da