“Mothers make a great many plans for their sons. This one, however flattering it is, doesn’t correspond with my intentions.”
“Oh, so much the worse,” said Jeanne.
“I’m not thinking of marrying,” he said.
“You’re wrong there,” said the girl, the reproach sounding queer and almost funny from her childish mouth.
“When one has the luck in life to meet a young girl like Margaret Roquevillard,” she added, “one oughtn’t to wreck such happiness one’s self.”
So this was what she had been driving at. He understood. She should have known from the change in his face that she had struck home, but at her tender age vision is not clear enough to read the inner feelings through the features. She was accordingly hardly moderate in heaping up her boarding-school disdain upon him.
“It’s always shabby, my dear sir, to desert a fiancée. And when she is in trouble it’s perfectly abominable.”
What right had she to scold him so violently? Raymond Bercy was irritated by it all, and yet, at the bottom of his heart, was conscious of a bitter-sweet pleasure in hearing Margaret spoken of. His anger and bitterness crept into his retort.
“I didn’t appoint you to judge me, mademoiselle,” he said, “but if you talk to me in the name of another, my reply is that——”
“I’m not speaking in any one’s name——”