ss despair of the poor man thus torn up as it were by the
roots was so artless, it showed so plainly the purity of his ways
and his ignorance of the things of life, that Madame de Listomere and
Mademoiselle de Salomon talked to him and consoled him in the tone which
mothers take when they promise a plaything to their children.

"Don't fret about such trifles," they said. "We will find you some place
less cold and dismal than Mademoiselle Gamard's gloomy house. If we
can't find anything you like, one or other of us will take you to live
with us. Come, let's play a game of backgammon. To-morrow you can go and
see the Abbe Troubert and ask him to push your claims to the canonry,
and you'll see how cordially he will receive you."

Feeble folk are as easily reassured as they are frightened. So the poor
abbe, dazzled at the prospect of living with Madame de Listomere, forgot
the destruction, now completed, of the happiness he had so long desired,
and so delightfully enjoyed. But at night before going to sleep, the
distress of a man to whom the fuss of moving and the breaking up of all
his habits was like the end of the world, came upon him, and he racked
his brains to imagine how he could ever find such a good place for his
book-case as the gallery in the old maid's house. Fancying he saw his
books scattered about, his furniture defaced, his regular life turned
topsy-turvy, he asked himself for the thousandth time why the first year
spent in Mademoiselle Gamard's house had been so sweet, the second
so cruel. His troubles were a pit in which his reason floundered. The
canonry seemed to him small compensation for so much misery, and
he compared his life to a stocking in which a single dropped stitch
resulted in destroying the whole fabric. Mademoiselle Salomon remained
to him. But, alas, in losing his old illusions the poor priest dared not
trust in any later friendship.

In the "citta dolente" of spinsterhood we often meet, especially in
France, with women whose lives are a sacrifice nobly and daily offered
to noble sentiments. Some remain proudly faithful to a heart which death
tore from them; martyrs of love, they learn the secrets of womanhood
only though their souls. Others obey some family pride (which in our
days, and to our shame, decreases steadily); these devote themselves to
the welfare of a brother, or to orphan nephews; they are mothers while
remaining virgins. Such old maids attain to the highest heroism of their