‘So that is the way in which you French fathers deliberate how to make victims of your daughters?’
He made her a little bow, and said, with is superior fraternal air:
‘You do not understand, my sister. The happiest will probably be she who leads the peaceful life of a nun.’
‘That makes it worse,’ cried Annora, ‘if you are arranging a marriage in which you expect your child to be less happy than if she were a nun.’
‘I said not so, sister,’ returned Solivet, with much patience and good-humour. ‘I simply meant what you, as a Huguenot, cannot perceive, that a simple life dedicated to Heaven is often happier than one exposed to the storms and vicissitudes of the world.’
‘Certainly you take good care it should prove so, when you make marriages such as that of the d’Aubepines,’ said Nan.
Solivet shrugged his shoulders by way of answer, and warned my afterwards to take good care of our sister, or she would do something that would shock us all. To which I answered that the family honour was safe in the hand of so high-minded a maiden as our Annora, and he replied:
‘Then there is, as I averred, no truth in the absurd report that she was encouraging the presumptuous advances of that factious rogue and Frondeur, young Darpent, whom our brother had the folly to introduce into the family.’
I did not answer, and perhaps he saw my blushes, for he added:
‘If I thought so for a moment, she may be assured that his muddy bourgeois blood should at once be shed to preserve the purity of the family with which I have the honour to be connected.’