sed her life with no knowledge of business, she had become rich
without knowing it and without the slightest desire to take advantage of
it. Her fine apartments in Paris, her father's magnificent chateau, made
her uncomfortable. She occupied as small a place as possible in both,
filling her life with a single passion, order--a fantastic, abnormal sort
of order, which consisted in brushing, wiping, dusting, and polishing the
mirrors, the gilding and the door-knobs, with her own hands, from morning
till night.

When she had nothing else to clean, the strange woman would attack her
rings, her watch-chain, her brooches, scrubbing the cameos and pearls,
and, by dint of polishing the combination of her own name and her
husband's, she had effaced all the letters of both. Her fixed idea
followed her to Savigny. She picked up dead branches in the paths,
scratched the moss from the benches with the end of her umbrella, and
would have liked to dust the leaves and sweep down the old trees; and
often, when in the train, she looked with envy at the little villas
standing in a line along the track, white and clean, with their gleaming
utensils, the pewter ball, and the little oblong gardens, which resemble
drawers in a bureau. Those were her ideal of a country-house.

M. Fromont, who came only occasionally and was always absorbed by his
business affairs, enjoyed Savigny little more than she. Claire alone felt
really at home in that lovely park. She was familiar with its smallest
shrub. Being obliged to provide her own amusements, like all only
children, she had become attached to certain walks, watched the flowers
bloom, had her favorite path, her favorite tree, her favorite bench for
reading. The dinner-bell always surprised her far away in the park. She
would come to the table, out of breath but happy, flushed with the fresh
air. The shadow of the hornbeams, stealing over that youthful brow, had
imprinted a sort of gentle melancholy there, and the deep, dark green of
the ponds, crossed by vague rays, was reflected in her eyes.

Those lovely surroundings had in very truth shielded her from the
vulgarity and the abjectness of the persons about her. M. Gardinois might
deplore in her presence, for hours at a time, the perversity of tradesmen
and servants, or make an estimate of what was being stolen from him each
month, each week, every day, every minute; Madame Fromont might enumerate
her grievances against the mice, the maggots, dust