twelve-o'clock
breakfast.

[Illustration: I loved to hear her play Beethoven and Handel.]

Sometimes when it was fine we would take a walk with the old people
after breakfast, but we generally spent our days apart. M. and Mme. A.
were charming people, intelligent, cultivated, reading everything and
keeping quite in touch with all the literary and Protestant world, but
they had lived for years entirely in the country, seeing few people,
and living for each other. The first evenings at the chateau made a
great impression upon me. We dined at 7:30, and always sat after
dinner in the big drawing-room. There was one lamp on a round table in
the middle of the room (all the corners shrouded in darkness). M. and
Mme. A. sat in two arm-chairs opposite to each other, Mme. A. with a
green shade in front of her. Her eyes were very bad; she could neither
read nor work. She had been a beautiful musician, and still played
occasionally, by heart, the classics. I loved to hear her play
Beethoven and Handel, such a delicate, old-fashioned touch. Music was
at once a bond of union. I often sang for her, and she liked
everything I sang--Italian stornelli, old-fashioned American negro
songs, and even the very light modern French chansonnette, when there
was any melody in them. There were two other arm-chairs at the table,
destined for W. and me. I will say W. never occupied his. He would sit
for about half an hour with M. A. and talk politics or local matters
with him, but after that he departed to his own quarters, and I
remained with the old people. I felt very strange at first, it was so
unlike anything I had ever seen, so different from my home life, where
we were a happy, noisy family, always one of the party, generally two,
at the piano, everybody laughing, talking, and enjoying life, and
always a troop of visitors, cousins innumerable and friends.

It was a curious atmosphere. I can't say dull exactly, for both M. and
Mme. A. were clever, and the discussions over books, politics, and
life generally, were interesting, but it was serious, no vitality,
nothing gay, no power of enjoyment. They had had a great grief in
their lives in the loss of an only daughter,[2] which had left
permanent traces. They were very kind and did their best to make me
feel at home, and after the first few evenings I didn't mind. M. A.
had always been in the habit of reading aloud to his wife for an hour
every evening after dinner--the paper, an article in o