“Yes, you will!” he said. He was furious, and very much frightened. He had no idea what she might do. “I’m going to call a taxi and send you home.”
“You’ll have to get a policeman to go with me!” she said, laughing again. “I won’t go! I don’t mind a row once in a while, but I don’t like the idea of a whole lot of them. It was hard enough to come and tell you about this, but you’ve made things impossible now. You won’t treat me as a woman—”
“You’re not a woman!” he cried. And certainly she had never looked less like one. She looked like a school-girl, reckless and ignorant of the consequences of her folly, her face alight with a defiance that was more mischievous than resolute.
“Good-by!” she said.
“Andrée!... Confound you!... Think of your mother! Go home, and we’ll talk the thing over thoroughly this evening!”
“All right!” she said, suddenly, and left him without another word.
§ ii
It was due to Claudine that she remained in the house until her wedding three weeks later. The distracted woman went from one to the other of them, seeing the breach widen every day. She implored and entreated Andrée, she faced Gilbert with unparalleled firmness; she was able to keep up an outward semblance of dignity in the family. But it was a monstrous thing. Andrée and her father never spoke to each other. The meals were a nightmare, to see them there side by side, so bitterly hostile. She dreaded to speak herself, for fear of hurting or angering one or the other of those inordinately sensitive creatures. Edna was grief-stricken; she had tried to remonstrate in the old friendly fashion with her sister, to make her realize the prodigious unfitness of Mr. Stephens, but she had been rudely rebuffed. Bertie was gravely displeased; he disapproved of Andrée and also of his parents for not preventing such a marriage.
“And these are the last days I’ll ever have Andrée with me!” thought the poor mother. “These bitter, wretched days! This is the end of her girlhood—and what an end! What a memory to take with her!”
The day after Stephens had returned from Europe he had invited her to tea with Andrée, without having made any attempt to see Andrée alone, or even to write to her. He had no need to ask Claudine whether she had succeeded in alienating Andrée from him; her face told him everything, her smile. He had a little table reserved for them in a corner of the tea-room, and they all sat down in silence.