Celestine and Hortense, in whom the ties of affection had been drawn
closer since they had lived under the same roof, were almost
inseparable. The Baroness, carried away by a sense of honesty which
led her to exaggerate the duties of her place, devoted herself to the
work of charity of which she was the agent; she was out almost every
day from eleven till five. The sisters-in-law, united in their cares
for the children whom they kept together, sat at home and worked. They
had arrived at the intimacy which thinks aloud, and were a touching
picture of two sisters, one cheerful and the other sad. The less happy
of the two, handsome, lively, high-spirited, and clever, seemed by her
manner to defy her painful situation; while the melancholy Celestine,
sweet and calm, and as equable as reason itself, might have been
supposed to have some secret grief. It was this contradiction,
perhaps, that added to their warm friendship. Each supplied the other
with what she lacked.
Seated in a little summer-house in the garden, which the speculator's
trowel had spared by some fancy of the builder's, who believed that he
was preserving these hundred feet square of earth for his own
pleasure, they were admiring the first green shoots of the
lilac-trees, a spring festival which can only be fully appreciated in
Paris when the inhabitants have lived for six months oblivious of what
vegetation means, among the cliffs of stone where the ocean of
humanity tosses to and fro.
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