“Extremely! I can’t help it: I do not suffer fools gladly; they make me irritable and unjust. I have not your charity.”
“It only needs a little indulgence; think of your mother.”
“Oh, my mother, my mother!”
There was something sorrowful and harsh about this exclamation that struck Gilberte. She kept silence from a sense of delicacy. But Guillaume was passing through one of those periods when it is a relief to the over-burdened soul to confess its troubles:
“Have my mother and I ever understood each other? We have not an idea in common. Her wants are not mine, nor are mine hers. She offends all my tastes as I offend all hers. If I display so much bitterness against the merry-andrews who perform in her salon, it is because of her. I hate to see her countenancing their grimaces and posturings.”
She said nothing. He asked:
“You blame me for it, don’t you? Yes, yes, I feel it.... And how strange: in your presence, I too think that I am wrong and, while I was saying those things, I blushed as if I had uttered ugly thoughts!”
She laughed:
“They were not very pretty ones.”
“Never mind, I prefer you to know them. I do not wish to trick you into liking me. If I ever win your esteem, I want to do so without hypocrisy, without trying to hide my faults from you.”