sely encircled her thin, sallow face. A number of deep wrinkles
had impressed their transverse furrows in her forehead of yellow ivory;
her marked and prominent nose was bent like the beak of a bird of prey;
her black eye was knowing and piercing; the expression of her countenance
was at once intelligent, cold and firm.

In the general management of the pecuniary affairs of the community,
Mother Sainte-Perpetue would have been a match for the most cunning
attorney. When women are possessed of what is called a talent for
business, and apply to it their keen penetration, their indefatigable
perseverance, their prudent dissimulation, and, above all, that quick and
exact insight, which is natural to them, the results are often
prodigious. To Mother Sainte-Perpetue, a woman of the coolest and
strongest intellect, the management of the vast transactions of the
community was mere child's play. No one knew better how to purchase a
depreciated property, to restore it to its former value, and then sell it
with advantage; the price of stock, the rate of exchange, the current
value of the shares in the different companies, were all familiar to her;
she had yet never been known to make bad speculation, when the question
was to invest any of the funds which were given by pious souls for the
purposes of the convent. She had established in the house the utmost
order and discipline, and, above all, an extreme economy. The constant
aim of all her efforts was to enrich, not herself, but the community she
directed; for the spirit of association, when become a collective
egotism, gives to corporations the faults and vices of an individual.
Thus a congregation may dote upon power and money, just as a miser loves
them for their own sake. But it is chiefly with regard to estates that
congregations act like a single man. They dream of landed property; it is
their fixed idea, their fruitful monomania. They pursue it with their
most sincere, and warm, and tender wishes.

The first estate is to a rising little community what the wedding
trousseau is to a young bride, his first horse to a youth, his first
success to a poet, to a gay girl her first fifty-guinea shawl; because,
after all, in this material age, an estate gives a certain rank to a
society on the Religious Exchange, and has so much the more effect upon
the simple-minded, that all these partnerships in the work of salvation,
which end by becoming immensely rich, begin with modest poverty