She laughed.
“What in the world is the matter with you, my dear boy? Do you imagine you can bully me?”
“I don’t want to. I’m asking you—to do me a favour.”
“It’s a ridiculous, selfish, unreasonable favour, and I shan’t do it.”
“I’m coming for you just the same, at eight o’clock!” he said.
She was going to remonstrate with him, but she found that he had left the telephone. Her cheeks flushed, and she bit her lip.
“Little beast!” she said to herself. But some secret thought made her unusually indulgent, she shrugged her shoulders and dismissed the thought of him.
She went on up to her mother’s room and knocked at the door.
“It’s Andrée!” she announced in her triumphal voice, as if that name were a talisman to admit her anywhere.
Claudine was sitting at her dressing-table, brushing her hair. There was grey in it now, on the temples, and her face was thin and drawn. She wore a negligée with high collar and long sleeves, to conceal the pitiful emaciation of her neck and arms. Andrée couldn’t look at her without a twinge of pain.