confided to my ear a sarcasm on the other teachers
(whom she had just been complimenting to their faces). »Nothing so absurd,« she
said, »as for des femmes mûres to dress themselves like girls of fifteen - quant
à la St Pierre, elle a l'air d'une vieille coquette qui fait l'ingénue.«
    Being dressed at least a couple of hours before anybody else, I felt a
pleasure in betaking myself - not to the garden, where servants were busy
propping up long tables, placing seats, and spreading cloths in readiness for
the collation - but to the school-rooms, now empty, quiet, cool, and clean;
their walls fresh stained, their planked floors fresh scoured and scarce dry;
flowers fresh gathered adorning the recesses in pots, and draperies, fresh hung,
beautifying the great windows.
    Withdrawing to the first classe, a smaller and neater room than the others,
and taking from the glazed book-case, of which I kept the key, a volume whose
title promised some interest, I sat down to read. The glass-door of this classe,
or school-room, opened into the large berceau; acacia-boughs caressed its panes,
as they stretched across to meet a rose-bush blooming by the opposite lintel: in
this rose-bush, bees murmured busy and happy. I commenced reading. Just as the
stilly hum, the embowering shade, the warm, lonely calm of my retreat were
beginning to steal meaning from the page, vision from my eyes, and to lure me
along the track of reverie, down into some deep dell of dream-land - just then,
the sharpest ring of the street-door bell to which that much-tried instrument
had ever thrilled, snatched me back to consciousness.
    Now, the bell had been ringing all the morning, as work-men, or servants, or
coiffeurs, or tailleuses, went and came on their several errands. Moreover,
there was good reason to expect it would ring all the afternoon, since about one
hundred externes were yet to arrive in carriages or fiacres: nor could it be
expected to rest during the evening, when parents and friends would gather
thronging to the play. Under these circumstances, a ring - even a sharp ring -
was a matter of course: yet this particular peal had an accent of its own, which
chased my dream, and startled my book from my knee.
    I was stooping to pick up this last, when - firm, fast, straight - right on
through vestibule, along corridor,