“She always had her way with us,” said Mademoiselle Esmeralda, scratching nervously upon the paper before her with her pencil, at this part of the relation. “We did not want to leave home, neither me nor father, and father said more than I ever heard him say before at one time. 'Mother,' says he, 'let me an' Esmeraldy stay at home, an' you go an' enjoy your tower. You've had more schoolin' an' you'll be more at home than we should. You're useder to city ways, havin' lived in 'Lizabethville.' But it only vexed her. People in town had been talking to her about traveling and letting me learn things, and she'd set her mind on it.”
She was very simple and unsophisticated. To the memory of her former truly singular life she clung with unshaken fidelity. She recurred to it constantly. The novelty and luxury of her new existence seemed to have no attractions for her. One thing even my Clélie found incomprehensible, while she fancied she understood the rest—she did not appear to be moved to pleasure even by our beloved Paris.
“It is a true maladie du pays,” Clélie remarked to me. “And that is not all.”
Nor was it all. One day the whole truth was told amid a flood of tears.
“I—I was going to be married,” cried the poor child. “I was to have been married the week the ore was found. I was—all ready, and mother—mother shut right down on us.”
Clélie glanced at me in amazed questioning.
“It is a kind of argot which belongs only to Americans,” I answered in an undertone. “The alliance was broken off.”
“Ciel!” exclaimed my Clélie between her small shut teeth. “The woman is a fiend!”
She was wholly absorbed in her study of this unworldly and untaught nature. She was full of sympathy for its trials and tenderness, and for its pain.
Even the girl's peculiarities of speech were full of interest to her. She made serious and intelligent efforts to understand them, as if she studied a new language.