‘But you, Madame, who laugh, yet respect the Church enough to sacrifice a virgin to it as the Greek to the Minotaur?’
‘There is no other retreat possible for girls of good family who are portionless,’ said the Duchess very positively.
‘But there are many men who do not marry for a dower.’
‘Perhaps, but not with us; it would be quite impossible, an unheard of thing,’ said the Duchesse, scandalised at such a suggestive violation of all etiquette and family dignity.
From time immemorial the younger sons or the unmarriageable daughters of the Valogne, of the Creusac, of the d’Authemont, of all the great races whose blood met in this child, had hidden their narrowed fates with decorum and stateliness in the refuge of the cloisters; why should she, because she had been born in the latter half of the nineteenth century, rebel against so just a disposal? And she did not rebel at all, would not, unless some man made love to her and put rebellion in her head. That man would not be Othmar; he had only one thought—Nadine Napraxine. If she had not been sure of that, she would not even have presented him to her young cousin, for she was a very proud woman despite her frivolity, and to seek a rich alliance for a poor relative would have seemed to her the last of degradations. Her own people, and her husband’s, had always married as sovereigns do, accepting and conferring equal advantages.
‘Poverty has the right to be as proud as it chooses so long as it accepts nothing; when once it has accepted anything, it has become mendicity,’ had said often the old Marquise de Creusac to her granddaughter, and Yseulte would not do dishonour to that lesson.
‘One can trust her implicitly,’ said Madame de Vannes once to her husband, who had answered:
‘Oh, yes, my dear; that is the result of an old-fashioned education. When your Blanchette and Toinon are at her age, they will know everything objectionable under the sun, but they will not let you know that they know it. You are bringing them up more britannico!’