Most books were romance to her, for most were of a life to which she had not been educated.

Even one or two purely Protestant books of missionary enterprise, found in a box in her dead mother's room, had had all the charms of poetry and adventure.

It was all new, therefore all delightful, even when the Protestant sentiments shocked her as being not merely untrue, but hurting that aesthetic sense never remote from the mind of the devout Catholic.
She had blushed when monsieur had first looked at her, in the hut on Vadrome Mountain, not because there was any soft sentiment about him in her heart--how could there be for a man she had but just seen!--but because her feelings, her imagination, were all at high temperature; because the man compelled attention.

The feeling sprang from a deep sensibility, a natural sense, not yet made incredulous by the ironies of life.

These had never presented themselves to her in a country, in a parish, where people said of fortune and misfortune, happiness and sorrow, "C'est le bon Dieu!"-- always "C'est le bon Dieu!" In some sense it was a pity that she had brains above the ordinary, that she had had a good education and nice tastes.