"Oh, the sour face! Is that what comes of your eternal reading?"
I had in my hand a volume of Plutarch in the French of Amyot. Her ridicule of reading annoyed me.
"No, Mademoiselle, it isn't from books that one draws sourness. I find more sweetness in them than in—most things." I was looking straight at her as I said this.
She pretended to laugh again, but turned quite red.
"Nay, forgive me," I said, instantly softened. "Ah, Celeste, you know too well what is the sweetest of all books for my reading." By my look and sigh, she knew I meant her face. But she chose to be contemptuous.
"Poh! What should a pale scholar know of such books? I tell you, Monsieur de Launay, you will never be a man till you leave your books and see a little of the world."
Though she called me truly enough a pale scholar, I was scarlet for a moment.
"And what do you know of the world, then?" I retorted. "Or of men either?"
"I am only a girl. But as to men, I have met one or two. There is your father, for example. And that brave and handsome Brignan de Brignan."
Whether I loved or not, I was certainly capable of jealousy; and jealousy of the fiercest arose at the name of Brignan de Brignan. I had never seen him; but she had mentioned him to me before, too many times indeed for me to hear his name now with composure. He was a young gentleman of the King's Guard, of whom, by reason of a distant relationship, her family had seen much during a residence of several months in Paris.