Avice hung her head. Presently she looked up again, remarking:
‘Living with papa first, and then with you, Jerome, is like going to school first with one schoolmaster, and then with another; and one uses the cane, and the other doesn’t.’
‘Is it?’
‘Sometimes, with papa, the sensation was just like what I could imagine a child feeling on being told, “Hold out your hand.” Horrible!’
‘You don’t mean——’ he began sharply.
‘That papa was cruel? Oh no! He never meant to be, at any rate. I suppose he could not help being cold and sarcastic and severe in manner. What he hated most was what he called drivelling sentimentality. I always knew in an instant when I had said something sentimental. And I think, as long as I live, I shall never forget the tone of his voice as he used to say, “That is your view of the case, is it, mademoiselle? Suppose we look at it in the light in which persons of judgment will see it.” And then, how foolish I was made to feel! Papa certainly could put people down in a way I never saw anyone else use.’
She sighed, and Jerome smiled rather bitterly, commiserating the young creature who had been trained in such a school.
‘She must be naturally gentle, I suppose, or she would have been—good heavens! who knows what she might have been at one-and-twenty?’
He could not but see, however, that she had much of his own intense fastidiousness, and that she was proud, and that frequently a flash of the sarcasm from which she had suffered would appear in her own remarks. And he was in despair at the prospect of the future which lay before her. Avice herself did not give much thought to that future. She was happier in the present than she ever had been before.
The day came at last, the last day of their stay at Ems. In the morning they were to leave. Jerome strolled into their sitting-room in the evening, and found Avice there.