Rosalie, who was a young girl already at the moment of their mishap, had been struck by the very different way in which her parents suffered. Mme. Le Quesnoy, renouncing everything, was steeped in a tearful religion, but Le Quesnoy set out to obtain strength from daily work accomplished. Her tender preference for her father arose in her through the exercise of her reason. Marriage, life in common with all the exaggerations, lies and lunacies of her Southerner, caused her to feel the shelter of the silent library all the more pleasantly because it was a change from the grandiose, cold and official interior of the Ministry. In the midst of their quiet chat, the noise of a door was heard, a rustling of silk, and Hortense would enter.
“Ah, ha! I knew I should find you here!”
She did not love to read, Hortense did not. Even novels bored her; they were never romantic enough to suit her exalted frame of mind. After running up and down for about five minutes with her bonnet on, she would cry:
“How these old books and papers do smell stuffy! Don’t you find it so, Rosalie? Come on, come a little with me! Papa has had you long enough. Now it’s my turn.”
And so she would carry her off to her bedroom, their bedroom; for Rosalie also had used it until she was twenty years old.
There, during an hour of delightful chat, she saw about her all those things which had been a part of herself—her bed with cretonne curtains, her desk, her étagère, her library, where a bit of her childhood still lingered about the titles of the volumes and about the thousand childish things preserved with all due devotion. Here she found again her old thoughts lying about the corners of that young girl’s bedroom, more coquettish and ornamented, it is true, than it was in her time. There was a rug on the floor; a night lamp in the shape of a flower hung from the ceiling and fragile little tables stood about for sewing or writing, against which one knocked at every step; there was more elegance and less order. Two or three pieces of work begun were hanging over the backs of the chairs and the open desk showed a windy scattering of note-paper with monograms. When you entered there was always a minute or two of trouble.
“O, it’s the wind,” said Hortense with a peal of laughter. “The wind knows I adore him; he must have come to see if I was at home.”
“They must have left the window open,” answered Rosalie quietly. “How can you live in such an interior? For my part I am not able to think if anything is out of place.”
She rose to straighten the frame of a picture fastened to the wall; it irritated her eyes, which were as exact as her nature.
“O, well! it’s just the contrary with me. It puts me in form. It seems to me that I am travelling.”