'All that to be wasted in a cloister!' he thought, with repugnance. It seemed a sin against nature's finest work, youth's most gracious grace. To be sixteen years old, and to have a face as fair as a flower, and to be the last of a great race, and yet to be doomed to be joyless, loverless, childless, from birth unto death, because a little gold and silver were lacking to her! To the master of millions it seemed the cruelest irony of fate that he had ever encountered. Why should the absurd codes and prejudices of the world make him powerless to give this unhappy child out of his abundance the little which she would need to take her place amidst those common human joys which the poorest can attain, but which the selfishness of man and the customs of society forbade to her, merely because she had been nobly born? He was thinking of her fate all the while that he talked to her of Melville; he was thinking of that supple slender form disguised under the nun's heavy garb, of that abundant hair shorn and falling to the stone floor. Could those gay, good-natured, idle, spendthrift people who condemned her so lightly to such a sacrifice, not surrender one of their luxuries, one of their follies, to save her?
Then he pictured to himself, with a smile at his own whimsical conceit, the tailors' bills of Madame de Vannes curtailed, her caprices sacrificed, her equipages diminished, her _parties de chasse_ discontinued, her superfluous jewels sold, to furnish with the result attained a dower to her portionless cousin! These good people called themselves Christians; nevertheless, such generosity would have seemed to them as impossible as to go out on to the boulevards in the goatskin of John the Baptist. Would there ever be a religion that should influence the lives of its professors? Christianity had had its own way for nigh two thousand years, and had scarcely left a mark on the world so far as practical renunciation went.
While he mused thus, he talked lightly and kindly to the girl, but he met with little response. The convent education had taught her silence, and she thought that he had only come to her side because he had pitied her solitude; that thought made her shy and proud. With all his good will, he failed to make much way into her friendship, or to elicit much more than monosyllabic replies, and he would have felt his benevolence wearisome had it not been that there was so much true loveliness in her features and in her form that he was not glad of his release when she was called by the Duchesse to the piano.