"Mamma," she soon began again, "your sister's married life must have been a very dull and tiresome one."
"Tiresome? What makes you think so?"
"Well, I only mean by what I hear in the Castle. My aunt lived in the right wing, and my uncle in the left. Sometimes he would not go near her rooms for weeks, and she never went to his. He had his own carriages and servants, and she had hers. They each went and came as they liked, without giving each other a thought. It must have been a strange sort of life."
"Oh, you are quite mistaken," replied her mother, who evidently saw nothing very shocking in such a state of things. "It was a perfectly happy marriage. My sister had never reason to complain of her husband, who fulfilled her every wish. She, fortunate being, was never subjected to the harsh words, to the scenes, which in later years, I had constantly to endure."
"Yes, you and papa were always quarrelling, that is true," said Gabrielle, naïvely. "Uncle Arno never did that, I am sure; but he took no interest in his wife, though he can take an interest in everything else, even in my schooling. It was very rude of him to say, a little while ago, in your presence, that he thought my education very deficient and neglected, and that it was easy to see at a glance I had always been left to maids and governesses."
"I am, unfortunately, accustomed to such inconsiderate, unkind speeches from him," declared the Baroness, with a sigh, which, however, did not for a moment interrupt her close examination of a pattern before her. "If I submit to them, I make the sacrifice simply and solely with a view to your future, my child."
Her daughter did not seem particularly moved by this proof of maternal solicitude.
"I was catechised like a little school-girl," she grumbled on. "He worried me so with his questions and cross-questions, that I got quite confused at last, and then he shrugged his shoulders and decreed that I should begin taking lessons again. Take lessons at seventeen! He will have masters out from the town for me, he says; but I shall just tell him pointblank that it is not necessary, and he need not trouble himself about the matter."
The mother looked up from her fashion-plates.
"For Heaven's sake, do nothing of the kind. As it is, you seem to live in a state of continual rebellion to your guardian, and I often tremble with fear lest you should rouse his anger with your pertness and obstinacy. So far, I must say, he has put up with your conduct with wonderful patience, he who could never brook a contrary word!"