CHAPTER XI
M ADAME ROBINEAU was tall, angular, thin-lipped and devout, and so far as she indulged in social intercourse, loved to mingle with other angular, thin-lipped and devout ladies who belonged to the same lay sisterhood. She dressed in unrelieved black and always wore on her bosom a bronze cross of threatening magnitude. She prayed in the Cathedral at inconvenient hours, and fasted as rigorously as her Confessor, Monsieur l’Abbé Duloup, himself. Monsieur l’Abbé regarded her as one of the most pious women in Chartres. No doubt she was.
But Félise, although a good Catholic in her very simple way, and anxious to win favour by observance of the rules of the solitary household, was wicked enough to wish that her aunt were not quite so pious. In religious matters a wide latitudinariani
