Turning to Alice, he added:
“Here is your mother. Arrange matters with her. Whatever she does is well done.” And with these words he effaced himself, above everything anxious to be at peace with all the world.
Madame Dulaurens had not replied to her husband’s speech. For the first time in her life she was jealous of him. Was he not mixing himself up with Alice’s confidences? She loved her daughter with a selfish and absorbing love, and by the continual encroachments of her power as a mother had, little by little, extinguished (without noticing it herself) the personality of this delicate, shrinking girl, already by nature too indolent and overprone to unquestioning submission. She enjoyed her daughter’s beauty as if it were her own possession, and treated this young life precisely as though she had but a helpless new-born infant to deal with. It was impossible for a guileless, affectionate disposition not to recognise such unfaltering devotion and not to be affected by it. Alice strove by her obedience to please her domineering mother, whose eyes she felt incessantly upon her; but this watchful regard was paralysing her with fear.
As the door closed on her husband Madame Dulaurens, glorying in the impression she had made and already on her guard against the danger which she guessed, came up to the girl and, putting her arms round her, sat beside her on the chair.
“My little Countess de Marthenay,” she whispered in her ear as she kissed her.
But the girl was still silent, and her tears began to flow.
“You want to marry, don’t you? And you confided in your father. Nothing could please me better. We shall never be parted. Armand has promised me that.” Still unwilling to doubt the realisation of her plans, after a pause, she continued:
“He will get on. If he cannot get the position he wants he will resign. Your fortune will be sufficient to live on without his working, and, besides, in society one always has something to do.”
Alice’s tears and persistent silence at last warned her mother that the trouble she feared was a reality.
“I was mistaken then, dearest child? You refuse to be his wife? You don’t care for him?”