Page:The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter.djvu/170

About this time Rodolphe was very much in love with his cousin Angela, who couldn’t bear him; and the thermometer was twelve degrees below freezing-point.

Mademoiselle Angela was the daughter of Monsieur Monetti, the chimney-doctor, of whom we have already had occasion to speak. She was eighteen years old, and had just come from Burgundy, where she had lived five years with a relative who was to leave her all her property. This relative was an old lady who had never been young apparently—certainly never handsome, but had always been very ill-natured, although—or perhaps because—very superstitious. Angela, who at her departure was a charming child, and promised to be a charming girl, came back at the end of five years a pretty enough young lady, but cold, dry and uninteresting. Her secluded provincial life, and the narrow and bigoted education she had received, had filled her mind with vulgar prejudices, shrunk her imagination, and converted her heart into a sort of organ, limited to fulfilling its function of physical balance-wheel. You might say that she had holy water in her veins instead of blood. She received her cousin with an icy reserve; and he lost his time whenever he attempted to touch the chord of her recollections—recollections of the time when they had sketched out that flirtation in the Paul-and-Virginia style which is traditional between cousins of different sexes. Still Rodolphe was very much in love with his cousin Angela, who couldn’t bear him; and learning one day