and hopes of girls just entering society.
Her taste in every thing belonging to the toilet was known to be fine
and sure: they loved, when in full dress for company, to pass under
her eyes; and she deeply enjoyed admiring and praising them, at the
same time pointing out any thing ill-judged or excessive. Not
unfrequently, the same ones, who, in the evening, in their glittering
array, had paused on their way to the ball, would return in the
morning, and sit with her, face to face, in communion on far other
and graver matters. Sick and erring hearts showed themselves to her
in utter sincerity, while, with unwearied sympathy and adroit wisdom,
she poured on them, drop by drop, the light, the truth, the life,
they needed. No one can tell to how many she was a spiritual mother,
her direction all the more welcome and efficacious that she was not a
director by profession, but by instinctive fitness.

Madame Swetchine enjoyed friendships of extraordinary strewth and
preciousness with the Countess de Nesselrode, the Princess Galitzin,
Madame de Saint Aulaire, the Duchess de Duras, the Marchioness de
Lillers, Madame Craven, the Duchess de la Rochefoucauld, and many
other women of noble natures and rich interior lives. The record of
their intercourse is an imperial banquet for the mind and heart of
the reader. The study of it must make ordinary women sigh for envy
and shame over their own cold relations, outward ambition, sterile
experience, and suspicious caution. Madame Swetchine writes, "I have
long made over all my invested capital to the account of those I
love: their welfare, their hopes, are the income on which I live."
The Duchess de Duras writes to her, "I love you more than I should
have believed it ever would be possible for me to love, after what I
have experienced. I believe in you, I who have become so suspicious.
I rely on you with entire security, whatever happens." Again she
writes, when her friend is absent in Russia, "I miss you every
moment. Return, return. Your chamber is ready, and that of Nadine.
Come, come, dear friend: life is so short, why lose it thus?" Madame
Swetchine held such a high place in the esteem of her friends,
because she was so serene, so wise, so steadfast, so kind, so pure,
that she soothed and strengthened all who came near her. One of her
friends expresses this in saying to her, "No society pleases and
agrees with me like yours." She always acted on her own aphorism, "To
bear faults, to