I admired her audacity.
"Certainly, me. For your parole forbids you to speak only to your mother and grandmother. You can tell me: and I shall tell them. You will not have told anybody anything, and they still will know it."
"Well, and are you 'nobody?'"
Fanny gazed into my eyes, became serious, and with trembling lips said:
"If you wish it—I am nobody. As if I had never been born."
From that moment Fanny began to be "someone," in my eyes.
Her little sophism pleased me. Perhaps on these terms we might come to an agreement.
"You have asked something very difficult of me, Fanny; but it is not impossible. Only you must wait a little: give me time to think it over. Until I have done so, be our go-between. Go in and tell grandmother what you have recommended to me, and that I said in answer, 'it is well.'"
I was cunning. I was dissembling. I thought in that moment, that, if Fanny should burst in childish glee into the neighboring room, and in triumphant voice proclaim the concession she had wrung out of me, I might tell her on her return the name of some place that did not exist, and so throw the responsibility off my own shoulders.
But she did not do that.