"I alone was the object of the attack, Moritz," said Flora, "Henriette and Kitty suffered only because they were with me. I cannot help saying that, to my mind, the principal blame in allowing matters to come to such a point is your own: you ought to have taken decided measures at the first hint of discontent among these wretches. A man of sufficient force of character is always master of such a situation. But your perpetual dread of offending and shocking makes you so weak——"
"Yes, weak enough with you, and with grandmamma," the councillor, pale with vexation, interrupted her. "You, especially, never rested until I recalled the promise I had given my workmen, and so irritated them intensely. Bruck is right——"
"I beg you spare me there!" Flora angrily exclaimed. "If you have no other authority upon whom to rely——"
The councillor approached her and looked into her eyes with amazement in his own. "What, Flora, still so hostile?"
"Do you imagine me so deplorably weak that I can assume and lay aside my views as one puts on and takes off a garment?" she asked, in reply.
"No, not that; but are you not rash thus to defy our whole cultivated society?"
"What is society to me?" She laughed aloud. "'Our whole cultivated society!'" she repeated. "Will you tell me how you can possibly find any connection between it and your poor failure of a protégé?"
The councillor shook his head, and took her hand in his; he was almost speechless with surprise. "Why, is it—can it be possible? Do you not know——"
"Good heavens! what is there to know?" she interrupted him, with an impatient frown, and a slight stamp of her small foot.
At this moment the door opened, and the Frau President entered. She was simply dressed in violet silk. It might have been that the colour made her face look shrunken and sallow, or perhaps she had had a restless night as the result of her yesterday's agitation,—she certainly looked haggard and old.