She also ate the unaccustomed bread of idleness. Had her aunt permitted, she would delightedly have helped with the house-work. But Madame Robineau, widow of a dealer in grain who, before his death, had retired on a comfortable fortune, lived, according to her lights, at her ease, her wants being scrupulously administered to by a cook and a maid. There was no place in the domestic machine for Félise. Her aunt passed long chilly hours over ecclesiastical embroidery, sitting bolt upright in her chair with a _chaufferette_ beneath her feet. Félise, unaccustomed needlewoman, passed longer and chillier hours (having no _chaufferette_) either playing with a grey ascetic cat or reading aloud _La Croix_, the only newspaper allowed to cross the threshold of the house. Now and again, Madame Robineau would drop her thin hands into her lap and regard her disapprovingly. One day she said, interrupting the reading,
“My poor child, how your education has been neglected. You scarcely know how to hold a needle, you can’t read aloud without making faults, and you are ignorant of the elements of our holy religion.”
“My Aunt,” Félise replied, “I know how to manage an hotel.”
“That would be of little use to your husband.”
“I am never going to marry, _ma tante_,” she said.
“You surely do not expect to be admitted into a convent?”
“Heaven would forbid,” said Madame Robineau severely, “seeing that you have not the vocation. But the _jeune fille bien élevée_”—in the mouth of her Aunt Clothilde the familiar phrase assumed a detestable significance, implying, to Félise’s mind, a pallid young creature from whom all blood and laughter had been driven by undesirable virtues—“the _jeune fille bien élevée_ has only two careers offered to her—the convent or marriage. For you, my dear child, it is marriage.”
“Well,” said Félise, with a smile, preparing, to resume the article in the newspaper over which she had stumbled, “perhaps the beautiful prince will come along one of these days.”
But Madame Robineau rebuked her for vain imaginings.
“It is true, what I said, that your education has been neglected. A young girl’s duty is not to look for princes, but to accept the husband chosen by the wisdom of her family.”
