Jacques blushed and frowned; he felt angry with her for asking him. But her eyes were still fixed on his face.
‘How can I tell, aunt? It hangs on all ... on all these presidents and people.’
Madame Troqueville gave a little shrug, and her lips curled into a tiny, bitter smile. ‘I wonder why men always hold women to be blind, when in reality their eyes are so exceeding sharp. Jacques, for my sake, and for Madeleine’s, for the child’s future doth so depend on it, won’t you endeavour to keep your uncle from ... from all these places.... I know you take your pleasure together, and I am of opinion you have some influence with him.’ Jacques was very embarrassed and very angry; it was really, he felt, expecting too much of a young man to try and make him responsible for his middle-aged uncle.
‘I fear I can do nothing, aunt. ’Tis no business of mine,’ he said coldly, and they parted for the night.
CHAPTER XI
REBUILDING THE HOUSE OF CARDS
All next day Madeleine had the feeling of something near her which she must, if she wished to live, push away, away, right out of her memory. Her vanity was too vigilant to have allowed her to give to Jacques a full account of the scene at the Hôtel de Rambouillet. The fixed smile, the failure to interest the Marquis, that awful exit, for instance, were too indecent to be mentioned. Even her thoughts blushed at their memory, and shuddered away from it—partly, perhaps, because at the back of her consciousness there dwelt always the imaginary Sappho, so that to recall these things was to be humiliated anew in her presence.
In fact, the whole scene at the Hôtel de Rambouillet must be forgotten, and that quickly, for it had been a descent into that ruthless world of reality in which Madeleine could not breathe. That world tyrannised over by the co-sovereigns Cause and Effect, blown upon by sharp, rough winds, and—most horrible of all—fretted with the counter-claims on happiness of myriads of individuals just as ‘square’ and real as she. In such a world how could she—with such frightful odds against her—hope for success, for here she was so impotent, merely a gauche young girl of no position?
There were times, as I have shown, when she felt a nostalgie for the world of reality, as a safe fresh place, but now ... in God’s name, back to her dreams.