e
tittle-tattle and their innumerable snuff-boxes, the long dinners, the
accomplishment-lessons, notably those in dancing and deportment, were
repugnant to the soul of the little hoyden. She made amends to herself
by observing these new scenes and characters narrowly, with the acute
natural perception that was one of her leading gifts. From this
artificial atmosphere of constraint, it was inevitable that she should
welcome hours of escape into her mother's unpretending domestic circle;
and already at ten years old she had pronounced the lot of a
scullery-maid enviable, compared to that of an old _marquise_.

Nevertheless the fact of her having, at an age when impressions are
strongest, and most lasting, mixed freely and on equal terms with the
upper classes of society, was a point in her education not without its
favorable action on her afterwards as a novelist. Despite her firm
republican sympathies, emphatic disdain for mere rank and wealth, and
her small mercy for the foibles of the fashionable world, she can enter
into its spirit, paint its allurements without exaggeration, and
indicate its shortcomings with none of that asperity of the outsider
which always suggests some unconscious envy lurking behind the scorn.

The despised accomplishment-lessons, in themselves tending only to so
much agreeable dabbling, proved useful to her indirectly by creating new
interests, and as an intellectual stimulus. There seems to have been
little or no method about her early education. The study of her own
language was neglected, and the time spent less profitably, she
considered in acquiring a smattering of Latin with Deschartres. She took
to some studies with avidity, while others remained wholly distasteful
to her. For mere head-work she cared little. Arithmetic she detested;
versification, no less. Her imagination rebelled against the
restrictions of form. Nowhere, perhaps, except in the free-fantasia
style of the novel, could this great prose-poet have found the right
field in which to do justice to her powers. The dry _technique_ in music
was a stumbling-block of which she was impatient. History and literature
she enjoyed in whatever they offered that was romantic, heroic, or
poetically suggestive. In her Nohant surroundings there was nothing to
check, and much to stimulate, this dominant, imaginative faculty. Her
youthful attempts at original composition she quickly discarded in
disgust; but it seemed almost a law of her min