“Is Miss de Bassompierre quite well now?” I asked.
“As well as you or I, no doubt; but she is an affected little thing, and gave herself invalid airs to attract medical notice. And to see the old dowager making her recline on a couch, and ‘my son John’ prohibiting excitement, etcetera—faugh! the scene was quite sickening.”
“It would not have been so if the object of attention had been changed: if you had taken Miss de Bassompierre’s place.”
“Indeed! I hate ‘my son John!’”
“‘My son John!’—whom do you indicate by that name? Dr. Bretton’s mother never calls him so.”
“Then she ought. A clownish, bearish John he is.”
“You violate the truth in saying so; and as the whole of my patience is now spun off the distaff, I peremptorily desire you to rise from that bed, and vacate this room.”
“Passionate thing! Your face is the colour of a coquelicot. I wonder what always makes you so mighty testy à l’endroit du gros Jean? ‘John Anderson, my Joe, John!’ Oh, the distinguished name!”
Thrilling with exasperation, to which it would have been sheer folly to have given vent—for there was no contending with that unsubstantial feather, that mealy-winged moth—I extinguished my taper, locked my bureau, and left her, since she would not leave me. Small-beer as she was, she had turned insufferably acid.
The morrow was Thursday and a half-holiday. Breakfast was over; I had withdrawn to the first classe. The dreaded hour, the post-hour, was nearing, and I sat waiting it, much as a ghost-seer might wait his spectre. Less than ever was a letter probable; still, strive as I would, I could not forget that it was possible. As the moments lessened, a restlessness and fear almost beyond the average assailed me. It was a day of winter east wind, and I had now for some time entered into that dreary fellowship with the winds and their changes, so little known, so incomprehensible to the healthy. The north and east owned a terrific influence, making all pain more poignant, all sorrow sadder. The south could calm, the west sometimes cheer: unless, indeed, they brought on their wings the burden of thunder-clouds, under the weight and warmth of which all energy died.