“Conceived every morn and deferred every eve.”
She got along as far as Sunday, the day when her presentiments, which had now reached a state of paroxysm, told her that the longed-for husband would arrive at an early hour.
When a pious woman expects her husband, and that husband has been absent from home nearly four months, she takes much more pains with her toilet than a young girl does, though waiting for her first betrothed.
This virtuous Caroline was so completely absorbed in exclusively personal preparations, that she forgot to go to eight o’clock mass. She proposed to hear a low mass, but she was afraid of losing the delight of her dear Adolphe’s first glance, in case he arrived at early dawn. Her chambermaid—who respectfully left her mistress alone in the dressing-room where pious and pimpled ladies let no one enter, not even their husbands, especially if they are thin—her chambermaid heard her exclaim several times, “If it’s your master, let me know!”
The rumbling of a vehicle having made the furniture rattle, Caroline assumed a mild tone to conceal the violence of her legitimate emotions.
“Oh! ’tis he! Run, Justine: tell him I am waiting for him here.” Caroline trembled so that she dropped into an arm-chair.
The vehicle was a butcher’s wagon.
It was in anxieties like this that the eight o’clock mass slipped by, like an eel in his slime. Madame’s toilet operations were resumed, for she was engaged in dressing. The chambermaid’s nose had already been the recipient of a superb muslin chemise, with a simple hem, which Caroline had thrown at her from the dressing-room, though she had given her the same kind for the last three months.
“What are you thinking of, Justine? I told you to choose from the chemises that are not numbered.”
The unnumbered chemises were only seven or eight, in the most magnificent trousseau. They are chemises gotten up and embroidered with the greatest care: a woman must be a queen, a young queen, to have a dozen. Each one of Caroline’s was trimmed with valenciennes round the bottom, and still more coquettishly garnished about the neck. This feature of our manners will perhaps serve to suggest a suspicion, in the masculine world, of the domestic drama revealed by this exceptional chemise.