Dora was vexed to see that she was considered merely as a young lady: she exerted herself to take a part in the conversation, but Mr. Connal never joined in conversation with her—with the most scrupulous deference he stopped short in the middle of his sentence, if she began to speak. He stood aside, shrinking into himself with the utmost care, if she was to pass; he held the boughs of the shrubs out of her way, but continued his conversation with Mademoiselle all the time. When they came in from their walk, the same sort of thing went on. “It really is very extraordinary,” thought she: “he seems as if he was spell-bound—obliged by his notions of politeness to let me pass incognita.”
Mademoiselle was so fully engaged, chattering away, that she did not perceive Dora’s mortification. The less notice Connal took of her, the more Dora wished to attract his attention: not that she desired to please him—no, she only longed to have the pleasure of refusing him. For this purpose the offer must be made—and it was not at all clear that any offer would be made.
When the ladies went to dress before dinner, Mademoiselle, while she was presiding at Dora’s toilette, expressed how much she was delighted with M. de Connal, and asked what her niece thought of him? Dora replied that indeed she did not trouble herself to think of him at all—that she thought him a monstrous coxcomb—and that she wondered what could bring so prodigiously fine a gentleman to the Black Islands.
“Ask your own sense what brought him here! or ask your own looking-glass what shall keep him here!” said Miss O’Faley. “I can tell you he thinks you very handsome already; and when he sees you dress!”
“Really! he does me honour; he did not seem as if he had even seen me, more than any of the trees in the wood, or the chairs in the room.”
“Chairs!—Oh, now you fish for complimens! But I shall not tell you how like he thinks you, if you were mise à la Françoise, to la belle Comtesse de Barnac.”
“But is not it very extraordinary, he absolutely never spoke to me,” said Dora: “a very strange manner of paying his court!”
Mademoiselle assured Dora “that this was owing to M. de Connal’s French habits. The young ladies in Paris passing for nothing, scarcely ever appearing in society till they are married, the gentlemen have no intercourse with them, and it would be considered as a breach of respect due to a young lady or her mother, to address much conversation to her. And you know, my dear Dore, their marriages are all make up by the father, the mother, the friends—the young people themselves never speak, never know nothing at all about each one another, till the contract is sign: in fact, the young lady is the little round what you call cipher, but has no value in société at all, till the figure of de husband come to give it the value.”
“I have no notion of being a cipher,” said Dora: “I am not a French young lady, Monsieur de Connal.”
“Ah, but my dear Dore, consider what is de French wife! Ah! then come her great glory; then she reign over all hearts, and is in full liberté to dress, to go, to come, to do what she like, with her own carriage, her own box at de opera, and—You listen well, and I shall draw all that out for you, from M. de Connal.”