“It was not my fault. You see, I had covered it with paper for fear of soiling it. We must have knocked it over, without doing so on purpose.”
“Was it there then?” asked Octave. “I did not notice it. Oh! for myself, I don’t care a bit! But Campardon thinks so much of his books!”
They kept passing it from one to the other, trying to put the corner straight again. Their fingers touched without a quiver. As they inflected on the consequences, they were quite dismayed at the accident which had happened to that handsome volume of George Sand.
“It was bound to end badly,” concluded Marie, with tears in her eyes.
Octave was obliged to console her. He would invent some story, Campardon would not eat him. And their uneasiness returned, at the moment of separation. They would have liked at least to have said something amiable to eaeh other; but the words choked them. Fortunately, a step was heard, it was the husband coming upstairs. Octave silently took her in his arms again and kissed her in his turn on the mouth. She once more complaisantly submitted, her lips iey cold as before. When he had noiselessly regained his room, he asked himself, as he took off his overcoat, whatever was it that she wanted? Women, he said, were decidedly very peculiar.
On the morrow, at the Cam pardons’, just as lunch was finished, Octave was once more explaining that he had clumsily knocked the book over, when Marie entered the room. She was going to take Lilitte to the Tuileries gardens, and she had called to ask if they would allow Angèle to accompany her. And she smiled at Octave, without the least confusion, and glanced in her innocent way at the book lying on a chair.
“Why, I shall be only too pleased!” said Madame Campardon. “Angèle, go and put your hat on. I have no fear in trusting her with you.”
Marie, looking very modest, in a simple dress of dark woollen stuff, talked of her husband, who had caught a cold the night before, and of the price of meat, which would soon prevent people buying it at all. Then, when she had left with Angèle, they all leant out of the windows to see them depart. Marie gently pushed Lilitte’s perambulator along the pavement with her gloved hands; whilst Angèle, knowing that they were looking at her, walked beside her friend, with her eyes fixed on the ground.
“How respectable she looks!” exclaimed Madame Campardon. “And so gentle! so decorous!”
Then, slapping Octave on the shoulder, the architect said: