Annette was twenty-one, but she looked much younger, owing to a certain slowness of development, an immaturity of mind and body. She reminded one not of an opening flower, but of a big, loose-limbed colt, ungainly still, but every line promising symmetry and grace to come. She was not quite beautiful yet, but that clearly was also still to come, when life should have had time to erase a certain ruminative stolidity from her fine, still countenance. One felt that in her schoolroom days she must have been often tartly desired not to "moon." She gave the impression of not having wholly emerged from the chrysalis, and her bewildered face, the face of a dreamer, wore a strained expression, as if some cruel hand had mockingly rent asunder the veils behind which her life had been moving and growing so far, and had thrust her, cold and shuddering, with unready wings, into a world for which she was not fully equipped.
And Annette, pale gentle Annette, standing on the threshold of life, unconsciously clutching an umbrella and a little handbag, was actually thinking of throwing herself into the water!
Not here, of course, but lower down, perhaps near St. Germains. No, not St. Germains,—there were too many people there,—but Melun, where the Seine was fringed thick with reeds and rushes, where in the dusk a determined woman might wade out from the bank till the current took her.
The remembrance of a certain expedition to Melun rose suddenly before her. In a kind of anguish she saw again its little red and white houses, sprinkled on the slope of its low hill, and the river below winding between its willows and poplars, amid meadows of buttercups, scattered with great posies of maythorn. She and he had sat together under one of the may trees, and Mariette, poor Mariette, with Antoine at her feet, had sat under another close at hand. And Mariette had sung in her thin, reedy voice the song with its ever-recurring refrain—
"Le vent qui vient à travers la montagne
Me rendra fou, oui, me rendra fou."
Annette shuddered and then was still.
It must have been a very deep wound, inflicted with a jagged instrument, which had brought her to this pass, which had lit this stony defiance in her soft eyes. For though it was evident that she had rebelled against life, it was equally evident that she was not of the egotistic temperament of those who rebel or cavil, or are discontented. She looked equable, feminine, the kind of woman who would take life easily, bend to it naturally,
"As the grass grows on the weirs";
who might, indeed, become a tigress in defence of her young, but then what woman would not?