“It is far easier to eradicate bad temper, or want of principle, than to put savoire faire, or a due sense of the convenances, into a girl,” she always says, but all the same she has tried to do her duty by this step-daughter of hers, in her cold steely way, and is quite convinced that she has been the means of snatching the brand from the burning, and saving a soul from perdition.
As Gabrielle and Zai stand side by side, quite a family resemblance can be traced between them. But it is only a general resemblance after all; for they are really as dissimilar as light and darkness.
Gabrielle has none of Zai’s angelic type. A celebrated French author once said that womankind are divided into three classes—Angels, Imbeciles, Devils.
Zai is an angel. Gabrielle is certainly not an imbecile, therefore she must be in the last class.
Both the sisters are tall, and both are slender, and both bear upon them an unmistakably aristocratic air, though Gabrielle’s claims to it are only partial. She inherits the creamy skin, the coal black heavy tresses, and the bold passionful eyes of her French mother, and in spite of her ripe and glowing tints of opal and rose, and her full pouting lips, she is cast in a much harder mould than Zai or the other sisters.
Gabrielle is in fact too hard and self-reliant for a woman, whose very helplessness is her chief charm, and in whom the clinging confiding nature that yearns for sympathy and support appeals to the masculine heart as most graceful and touching of all things, for timidity is the most taking attribute of the fair sex, though it has its attendant sufferings and inconveniences.
The self-assertion, and freedom, and independence that there is so much chatter about amongst our women now-a-days is only a myth after all, for a real refined womanly nature closes like the leaf of the sensitive plant at unaccustomed contact with the world.
But there are women, and women, and men who fancy each sort according to good or bad taste. There is none of the sensitive plant about Gabrielle Beranger anyway. She is of a really independent nature that will assert itself per fas et ne fas—a nature that can brook no control, and that throws off all conventional shackles with barely concealed contempt. She is a Bohemian all over, she has belonged to the Bedouins of civilisation from her youth up, and has run rampant through a labyrinth of low life, and the tastes that go hand in hand with it, but on the principle that all things are good for something, Gabrielle’s hardness and self-reliance, united to acuteness, have served her during her career when a nobler but weaker nature might have sunk beyond redemption.
Her early years have unfitted her for the Belgravian life that fate has chalked out, and a treadmill of social duties proves so tiresome that no paraphernalia of luxury—dearly as she loves it—reconciles her to her lot. At least it did not do so until she fell head over ears in love with the fair, languid, and brilliant peer—the Earl of Delaval.
Her wilful, fiery spirit revolts at being a sort of pariah to her stepmother and her stepmother’s swell relatives, the swells whom (until she knew Lord Delaval) her revolutionary spirit despised utterly. She would give worlds if the man she loves was a Bohemian like herself, and whatever is true in her is comprised in her feelings for him.