Forget-me-not by Marjorie Bowen — Read

The pastor Monet's supper was ready, the fire was burning cheerfully, the lamp in the large, opal globe lit, the wife was hastening, in a kindly fashion, the one little maid in the final preparation of the last meal.

At a side table in the pleasant parlour Louise Monet was illuminating a text; one of the beatitudes, "Blessed are the pure in heart," began to flourish in gold and scarlet under her pen. Her sister Hortense sat beside her knitting a curly tippet in white Iceland wool. She had recently recovered from a slight attack of bronchitis and it was anxiety on her behalf and the unexpected dampness of the autumn day which had kept the family at home instead of attending as usual the Thursday service of the husband and father at the Chapel of the Oratory. The demoiselles Monet were plain young women with pallid complexions and greasy hair, their teeth were irregular and they had a tendency to pimples and violent attacks of indigestion. There was only a year between them and they were exactly alike, similar too in their sweet and patient dispositions. Pliant, stupid and obedient, they had inherited their father's unwavering piety and absorbed their mother's conventional decorum so successfully that they had become in all the utmost that their parents could have wished. The flame of their unblemished goodness flickered brightly even after five years' residence in the corruption which they were well aware blighted the capital; their father, though anxious at first as to the wisdom of transporting these two innocents from a small country town to the hectic wickedness of Paris, had long since had his fears allayed. The virtue of Louise and Hortense Monet was such as could walk unspotted through the streets of Babylon; they lived as removed from the world about them as fishes swimming in a bowl are removed from the room that houses them. Louise was going to be a missionary in China, Hortense was betrothed to a young man of whom her parents completely approved.