Madame Oberlé had gone upstairs, saying to the caretaker:
"You will receive a gentleman presently who will ask for me."
In the large room on the first floor which she entered, one of the few rooms which were still furnished, she had seen her parents live and die; the walnut-wood bed, the brown porcelain stove, the chairs covered with woollen velvet which repeated on every seat and every back the same basket of flowers, the crucifix framed under raised glass, the two views of Italy brought back from a journey in 1837, all remained in the same places and in the same order as in the old days. Instinctively in crossing the threshold she sought the holy water stoup hanging near the lintel, where the old people, when they went into the room, moistened their fingers as on the threshold of a holy abode.
The two women went towards the window. Madame Oberlé wore the same black dress she had put on to receive the Prefect of Strasburg. Lucienne had put on a large brimmed hat of grey straw, trimmed with feathers of the same shade, as if to cover her fair hair with a veil of shadow. Her mother thought her beautiful—and did not say so. She would have hastened to say so if the betrothed had not been he whom they expected, and if the sight of the house, and the memory of the good Alsatian folk who had lived in it, had not made the pain she already felt greater.
She leant against the windows and looked down into the garden full of box-trees clipped into rounded shapes, and flower borders outlined by box, and the winding, narrow paths where she had played, grown up, and dreamed. Beyond the garden there was a walk made on the town ramparts, and between the chestnuts planted there one could see the blue plain.
Lucienne, who had not spoken since the arrival at Obernai, guessing that she would have disturbed a being who was asking herself whether she could continue and complete her sacrifice, came quite close to her mother, and with that intelligence which always took everyone's fancy the first time they heard it, but less the second time:
"You must suffer, mamma," she said. "With your ideas, what you are doing is almost heroic!"
The mother did not look up, but her eyelids fluttered more, and quickly.
"You are doing it as a wifely duty, and because of that I admire you. I do not believe I could do what you are doing—give up my individuality to such an extent."
She did not think she was being cruel.