She pulled her hand gently away and looked him steadily in the face in an embarrassing manner without answering him. His features were drawn and weary from his days of work in the Assembly, showing that loosened look of the face and revealing in the corners of the eyes and the mouth a character at once weak and violent—all the passions and nothing to resist them. Faces down south are like the Southern landscape. It is better not to look at them unless the sun is shining.
“Are you dining at home?” asked Rosalie.
“No, I’m sorry to say—I’m expected at Durand’s—a tiresome dinner—té! I’m already late,” added he as he rose. “Luckily it is not necessary to dress there.”
That fixed look in his wife’s face followed him. “Dine with me, I beg of you—” and her harmonious voice hardened into insistence and sounded threatening and implacable.
But Roumestan was no observer. “And besides, business is business, is it not so? O, this life of a public man cannot be arranged as one would wish!”
“Well then, goodbye,” said she gravely, completing that farewell within her own mind with a “since it is our destiny.”
She listened to the coupé roll off beneath the vaulted passage and then, having carefully folded up her work, she rang.
“A carriage, right away—a hackney-coach—and you, Polly, give me my mantle and bonnet—I’m going out.”
Quickly ready to start, she embraced in one look the chamber she was quitting, where she neither regretted anything nor left behind her any part of herself, for it was merely the room of a furnished apartment-house despite all the pomp of its cold yellow brocades.
“See that the big cardboard box is put in the carriage.”