"You agree with me for politeness' sake. What weakness!" she said angrily, with the impatience that women take no pains to conceal from men whom they don't like.
The slight smile with which Luigi assented to this proposition, and implied, moreover, that weakness born of a desire to please a loved one, was not altogether reprehensible, annoyed her more than ever. Anna wished the whole exterior world to keep tune to her own ruling thought, and anybody who by any means prevented such a harmony became odious to her. Such an one was Luigi Caracciolo.
Cesare Dias, with his acute insight, watched the couple rather closely. And when he saw Anna trying to avoid a conversation with Luigi, refusing to dance with him, or receiving him with scant courtesy, a slight elevation of his eyebrows testified to his discontent.
One day, when she had turned her back upon the young man at a concert, Cesare Dias, coming up, said to her, "You appear to be treating Caracciolo rather badly, Anna."
"I don't think so," she replied, trembling at his harsh tone.
"I think so," he insisted. "And I beg you to be more civil to him."
"I will obey you," she answered.
For several days after that she seemed very melancholy. Laura, who continued to sleep in the same room with her, often heard her sighing at night in her bed. Two or three times she had asked a little anxiously, "What is the matter?"
"Nothing, nothing. Go to sleep," Anna replied.
On the next occasion of her meeting Caracciolo, she treated him with exaggerated gentleness, in which, however, the effort was very apparent. He took it as so much to the good. She persevered in this behaviour during their next few interviews, and then she asked Dias, triumphantly: "Am I doing as you wish?"