CHAPTER X. COMMON MISERY
The Contessina’s disposition was too different from her mother’s for the mother to comprehend that heart, the more contracted in proportion as it was touched, while emotion was synonymous with expansion in the opulent and impulsive Venetian. That evening she had not even observed Alba’s dreaminess, Dorsenne once gone, and it required that Hafner should call her attention to it. To the scheming Baron, if the novelist was attentive to the young girl it was certainly with the object of capturing a considerable dowry. Julien’s income of twenty-five thousand francs meant independence. The two hundred and fifty thousand francs which Alba would have at her mother’s death was a very large fortune. So Hafner thought he would deserve the name of “old friend,” by taking Madame Steno aside and saying to her:
“Do you not think Alba has been a little strange for several days!”
“She has always been so,” replied the Countess. “Young people are like that nowadays; there is no more youth.”
“Do you not think,” continued the Baron, “that perhaps there is another cause for that sadness—some interest in some one, for example?”
“Alba?” exclaimed the mother. “For whom?”
“For Dorsenne,” returned Hafner, lowering his voice; “he just left five minutes ago, and you see she is no longer interested in anything nor in any one.”
“Ah, I should be very much pleased,” said Madame Steno, laughing. “He is a handsome fellow; he has talent, fortune. He is the grand-nephew of a hero, which is equivalent to nobility, in my opinion. But Alba has no thought of it, I assure you. She would have told me; she tells me everything. We are two friends, almost two comrades, and she knows I shall leave her perfectly free to choose.... No, my old friend, I understand my daughter. Neither Dorsenne nor any one else interests her, unfortunately. I sometimes fear she will go into a decline, like her cousin Andryana Navagero, whom she resembles.... But I must cheer her up. It will not take long.”
“A Dorsenne for a son-in-law!” said Hafner to himself, as he watched the Countess walk toward Alba through the scattered groups of her guests, and he shook his head, turning his eyes with satisfaction upon his future son-in-law. “That is what comes of not watching one’s children closely. One fancies one understands them until some folly opens one’s eyes!... And, it is too late!... Well, I have warned her, and it is no affair of mine!”