‘Maman baisse un peu,’ she often said to her sister, with a little scornful smile. She knew that her mother was twenty-eight; to Blanchette that age seemed to be quite hopeless decrepitude.
‘Yseulte,’ she said, suddenly now, ‘if you do not give me your silver prayer-book, I shall tell mamma about you and papa. Dis donc, sois sage. Give me the silver Hours.’
The silver prayer-book had belonged to a Marquise de Creusac, in the time of Louis Treize. It was adorned with illuminated letters, and the coronet and initials were set in opals on one side of the silver cover. Yseulte had been given the book by her grandmother on her death-bed; she used it always, and it was the object of Blanchette’s desires.
‘You know that I cannot give it you,’ said Yseulte, gently. ‘It was my grandmother’s last gift; it is an heirloom.’
Blanchette looked up from under her yellow hair.
‘You had better give it me. Sois sage!’
She had the same expression—half menace, half malice—that her father had had.
‘I cannot,’ repeated her cousin, ‘I have told you so, dear, a hundred times. I should not have a moment’s peace if I parted with that book.’
Blanchette said nothing more, but she made a wheel of herself on the school-room floor, as she had seen the boys do on the pavement in Paris. ‘Comme on est bête! Comme on est bête!’ she kept thinking in her shrewd little mind, as she stood on her wise little skull with all the dexterity of any street-boy.
Blanchette at ten years old had already resolved the problem of life with great simplicity; its solution seemed to her to consist in getting whatever you wanted by being detestable whenever you did not get it.