“I don’t propose to make any complaints or reproaches; and yet—Oh! my dear, how changed you are!”
“I have been sick.”
“Why not have written to me? I would have come and nursed you.”
“I needed nobody.”
“And this is the way you treat her whom you have reduced to want! I have lost my mother, and I no longer have a husband! Chance alone is responsible for my meeting you; I have asked for you in all the places where you have lived, but no one has been able to give me any news of you. For a fortnight I have been here; I was losing hope when at last I caught sight of you, dear Edouard; and this is the way you speak to me; and you don’t even kiss your daughter!”
“Do you want me to make a show of myself to the passers-by?”
“How can the sight of a father kissing his child be absurd, in the eyes of decent people? But let us go in somewhere, into a café.”
“I haven’t any time.”
“Where do you live now?”
“A long way from here; I was in very straitened circumstances, and Dufresne took me in to lodge with him.”