There was a wild look in the eyes of the baroness.
“Mad, unhappy child!” she exclaimed. “If your father should hear!”
“And who, then, would report our conversation to him? M. de Tregars? He would not do such a thing. You? You dare not.”
Drawing herself up to her fullest height, her breast swelling with anger, her head thrown back, her eyes flashing,
“Cesarine,” ordered Mme. de Thaller, her arm extended towards the door—“Cesarine, leave the room; I command you.”
But motionless in her place the girl cast upon her mother a look of defiance.
“Come, calm yourself,” she said in a tone of crushing irony, “or you’ll spoil your complexion for the rest of the evening. Do I complain? do I get excited? And yet whose fault is it, if honor makes it a duty for me to cry ‘Beware!’ to an honest man who wishes to marry me? That Gilberte should get married: that she should be very happy, have many children, darn her husband’s stockings, and skim her pot-au-feu,—that is her part in life. Ours, dear mother,—that which you have taught me—is to laugh and have fun, all the time, night and day, till death.”
A footman who came in interrupted her. Handing a card to Mme. de Thaller,
“The gentleman who gave it to me,” he said, “is in the large parlor.”
The baroness had become very pale.