"ferret of the woods," which runs from hand
to hand and which always returns to its point of setting out. All the
scornful are themselves scorned by some one--a merited punishment, which
does not correct our pride any more than the other punishments
which abound in life cure our other faults. Lydia's persecutors were
themselves the objects of outrages practised by their comrades born in
England, on account of certain peculiarities in their language and for
the nasal quality of their voices. The drama was limited, as we
can imagine, to a series of insignificant episodes and of which the
superintendents only surprised a demi-echo.

Children nurse passions as strong as ours, but so much interrupted
by playfulness that it is impossible to measure their exact strength.
Lydia's 'amour propre' was wounded in an incurable manner by that
revelation of her own peculiarity. Certain incidents of her American
life recurred to her, which she comprehended more clearly. She recalled
the portrait of her grandmother, the complexion, the hands, the hair
of her father, and she experienced that shame of her birth and of
her family much more common with children than our optimism imagines.
Parents of humble origin give their sons a liberal education, expose
them to the demoralization which it brings with it in their positions,
and what social hatreds date from the moment when the boy of twelve
blushes in secret at the condition of his relatives! With Lydia,
so instinctively jealous and untruthful, those first wounds induced
falsehood and jealousy. The slightest superiority even, noticed in
one of her companions, became to her a cause for suffering, and she
undertook to compensate by personal triumphs the difference of blood,
which, once discovered, wounds a vain nature. In order to assure herself
those triumphs she tried to win all the persons who approached her,
mistresses and comrades, and she began to practise that continued comedy
of attitude and of sentiment to which the fatal desire to please, so
quickly leads-that charming and dangerous tendency which borders much
less on goodness than falseness. At eighteen, submitted to a sort of
continual cabotinage, Lydia was, beneath the most attractive exterior,
a being profoundly, though unconsciously, wicked, capable of very little
affection--she loved no one truly but her brother--open to the invasion
of the passions of hatred which are the natural products of proud and
false minds. It was on