mic utterance fine and strange. The 'action' began:
to me it seemed all the more obscure because in those days, when I read
to myself, I used often, while I turned the pages, to dream of something
quite different. And to the gaps which this habit made in my knowledge
of the story more were added by the fact that when it was Mamma who was
reading to me aloud she left all the love-scenes out. And so all the odd
changes which take place in the relations between the miller's wife and
the boy, changes which only the birth and growth of love can explain,
seemed to me plunged and steeped in a mystery, the key to which (as I
could readily believe) lay in that strange and pleasant-sounding name of
_Champi_, which draped the boy who bore it, I knew not why, in its own
bright colour, purpurate and charming. If my mother was not a faithful
reader, she was, none the less, admirable when reading a work in which
she found the note of true feeling by the respectful simplicity of her
interpretation and by the sound of her sweet and gentle voice. It was
the same in her daily life, when it was not works of art but men and
women whom she was moved to pity or admire: it was touching to observe
with what deference she would banish from her voice, her gestures, from
her whole conversation, now the note of joy which might have distressed
some mother who had long ago lost a child, now the recollection of an
event or anniversary which might have reminded some old gentleman of the
burden of his years, now the household topic which might have bored some
young man of letters. And so, when she read aloud the prose of George
Sand, prose which is everywhere redolent of that generosity and moral
distinction which Mamma had learned from my grandmother to place above
all other qualities in life, and which I was not to teach her until
much later to refrain from placing, in the same way, above all other
qualities in literature; taking pains to banish from her voice any
weakness or affectation which might have blocked its channel for that
powerful stream of language, she supplied all the natural tenderness,
all the lavish sweetness which they demanded to phrases which seemed
to have been composed for her voice, and which were all, so to speak,
within her compass. She came to them with the tone that they required,
with the cordial accent which existed before they were, which dictated
them, but which is not to be found in the words themselves, and by these
mean