“I know what I am asking for. Let me see the letter which has vexed you.”
“Oh, woman, woman! And after having always assured my mother that you were free from the vice of curiosity!” he said, trying to recover his lightness.
“This is not curiosity,” she replied, quietly.
He broke away, and came back.
“See, here, Nathalie, be reasonable! Remember that all these years we have been very happy—”
And then she interrupted him with her hand raised, with a strange, almost fierce, ring in her voice which he had never heard before.
“I have not.”
He stared at her blankly.
“You have not! Great heavens, what are you saying?”
“I am saying the truth at last—the truth which you have never consented to hear!” she cried, passionately. “Has it been happiness to live here, do you suppose, looked down upon and scorned by your mother and sisters? Because I have held my tongue that you might not have your life marred, too, because I have gone my way silently, do you believe, do you know me so little as to believe, that I have not felt! What sort of position do I hold in this house, this great château of Poissy, of which my father thinks so much! They treat me as an inferior, you as if I were a child.” Her voice changed, trembled again. “I could have borne it all—yes, all, if it had not been for that; but that—that has been almost insupportable. To have no part in your graver life; to be left, when anything fretting came to you, for your mother! I have tried to be just, I have indeed! I think of myself and Raoul. I do not begrudge her her rights, nor wish to shut her out from sharing whatever comes to you; but I—I, too, ought to be admitted, and until you take me as God meant you to take me, your wife for sorrow as well as for joy, your wife, and not only your playfellow, do not talk of me as happy, nor imagine that you can make me so.”