made her morbidly sensitive.

In those days red hair evoked nothing but a pointed reference to
carrots--that from the ill-natured; the good-natured would feel
compassion for the poor girls who were thus afflicted. I wonder
sometimes whether the red of those days was the same we admire now,
whether those carrots of my youth can have been transformed into the
lusciously lustrous locks of to-day. Were they formerly only under a
cloud and crushed under the weight of unanimous condemnation? Could the
molten gold have been hidden away, and the deep-toned brass notes
silenced, and were they only waiting to be combed and coaxed to the
front?--Well, the trials of the sandy-hair phase are over, and I, for
one, am grateful to live in the Renaissance period, and to witness the
triumph of woman's loveliest crown.

Poor Mademoiselle Jeanne did what she could to conceal the luxuriant
crop Nature had given her. She wound it in tight coils round the back of
her head, where at least she could not see it if she chanced to come
across a looking-glass. She brushed it off her forehead with a
determination to show as little as possible of it in front, and if a few
spiteful stray hairs would not lie down with the rest, she cut them off,
much to my distress, for, when talking to her, my eyes were always
wandering to the little border of reddish stubble that remained, and I
saw her see me seeing, and that made it awkward for both.

Her extreme sensitiveness no doubt originated in the unkind comments
made upon her in her childhood. As she grew up, it seemed impossible to
efface these early impressions. She had got it into her head that she
was the ugly duckling, and neither parents nor friends could persuade
her to the contrary. But she gradually accepted what she considered the
inevitable, and at the time Claude appeared on the scene (I introduced
him to the family) she had sufficiently overcome her shyness, to perform
the duties of a young lady of eighteen in her mother's salon, without
betraying how much she would have preferred keeping in the background.
It was very characteristic of that young lady that, when she did emerge
from the background, she would do so with a rush; whether she offered
you a chair or a cup of tea, she came upon you unexpectedly, firing as
it were, at close quarters, and retreating before you could capture her.

"I know I'm a coward," she said to me one day when we were talking of
heroes, "and it's just because I'm