res;
in the first place the thinness of the cheeks and their hue of old wood
dotted here and there with freckles, calm stains of the colour of stale
bran; then the flat braids of white hair drawn smooth under a frilled
cap, and finally the modest dress, a black dress clumsily made, dragging
across the bosom, and showing the lines of her stays stamped in relief
on the back.

"And perhaps, in her, it is not so much incongruity of features, as a
crying contrast between the dress and the face, the head and the body,"
thought he.

Altogether, as he summed her up, she was equally suggestive of the
chapel and the fields. Thus she had something of the Sister and
something of the peasant.

"Yes," he went on to himself, "that is very near the mark; but that is
not all, for she is both less dignified and less common, inferior and
yet more worthy. Seen from behind she is more like a woman who hires out
the chairs in church than like a nun; seen in front she is conspicuously
superior to the natives of the soil. Also it may be noted that when she
speaks of the saints she is loftier, quite different; she soars up in a
flame of the spirit. But all these hypotheses are in vain," he
concluded, "for I cannot judge of her from one brief impression, one
rapid view. What is quite certain is that, though she is not in the
least like the Abbe, she too is in two halves--two persons in one. He,
with the innocent gaze, the pure eyes of a girl at her first Communion,
has the sometimes bitter mouth of an old man; she is proud of feature
and humble of heart; they both, though by different outward signs and
acts, achieve the same result, an identical semblance of paternal
indulgence and mature goodness."

And Durtal had gone again and again to see them. His reception was
always the same; Madame Bavoil greeted him with the invariable formula:
"Here is our friend," while the priest's eyes smiled as he grasped his
hand. Whenever he saw Madame Bavoil she was praying: over her stove,
when she sat mending, while she was dusting the furniture, as she opened
the door, she was always telling her rosary, without pause.

The chief delight of this rather silent woman consisted in talking of
the Virgin to whom she had vowed worship; on the other hand she could
quote by memory long passages from a mystic and somewhat eccentric
writer of the end of the sixteenth century: Jeanne Chezard de Matel, the
foundress of the Order of the Incarnate Word, an Institution