“Oh!” Jaume Deydier rejoined with a shrug of his wide shoulders, “girls always say that at first. She is not in love with any one else, I suppose!”
“God forbid!” Margaï exclaimed, so hastily that the wooden spoon wherewith she had been stirring the soup a moment ago fell out of her hand with a clatter.
“There, now!” she said tartly, “you quite upset me with your silly talk. Nicolette in love? With whom, I should like to know?”
“Well then,” Deydier retorted.
“Well then what?”
“Why should she refuse Ameyric? He loves her. He would suit me perfectly as a son-in-law. What has the child got against him?”
“But can’t you wait, Mossou Jaume?” Margaï would argue. “Can’t you wait? Why, the child is not yet nineteen.”
“My wife was seventeen when I married her,” Deydier retorted. “And I would like to see Nicolette tokened before the fêtes. I was affianced to my wife two days before Noël, we had the gros soupé at her parents’ house on Christmas Eve, and walked together to midnight Mass.”
“And two years later she was in her coffin,” Margaï muttered.
“What has that to do with it? Thou’rt a fool, Margaï.” Whereupon Margaï, feeling that in truth her last remark had been neither logical nor kind, reverted to her original argument: “One would think you wanted to be rid of the child, Mossou Jaume.”