her constitution. When her father took her from school,
no one was sorry to see her go. The Lady Superior even thought that she
had latterly been somewhat irreverent to the community.

Emma at home once more, first took pleasure in looking after the
servants, then grew disgusted with the country and missed her convent.
When Charles came to the Bertaux for the first time, she thought
herself quite disillusioned, with nothing more to learn, and nothing
more to feel.

But the uneasiness of her new position, or perhaps the disturbance
caused by the presence of this man, had sufficed to make her believe
that she at last felt that wondrous passion which, till then, like a
great bird with rose-colored wings, had hung in the splendor of the
skies of poesy; and now she could not think that the calm in which she
lived was the happiness she had dreamed.

VII.

DISILLUSION.

She thought sometimes that, after all, this was the happiest time of her
life--the honeymoon, as people called it. To taste the full sweetness of
it, it would have been necessary doubtless to fly to those lands with
sonorous names where the days after marriage are full of laziness most
suave. In post-chaises behind blue silken curtains to ride slowly up
steep roads, listening to the song of the postilion re-echoed by the
mountains, along with the bells of goats and the muffled sound of a
waterfall; at sunset on the shores of gulfs to breathe in the perfume of
lemon-trees; then in the evening on the villa-terraces above, hand in
hand to look at the stars, making plans for the future. It seemed to her
that certain places on earth must bring happiness, as a plant peculiar
to the soil, that cannot thrive elsewhere. Why could not she lean over
balconies in Swiss chalets, or enshrine her melancholy in a Scotch
cottage, with a husband dressed in a black velvet coat with long tails,
and thin shoes, a pointed hat and frills?

Perhaps she would have liked to confide all these things to some one.
But how tell an undefinable uneasiness, variable as the clouds, unstable
as the winds? Words failed her--the opportunity, the courage.

If Charles had but wished it, if he had guessed it, if his look had but
once met her thought, it seemed to her that a sudden plenty would have
gone out from her heart, as the fruit falls from a tree when shaken by a
hand. But as the intimacy of their life became deeper, the greater
became the gulf that separated her from him.