"There are not two ways of thinking, my dear child."
Or, when Annette none the less tried to show that there was a way also of her own:
"My dear, how amusing you are!"
Which had the effect of making her instantly shut her mouth.
They already treated her as a daughter of the house, not quite thoroughly trained, whom they were instructing. They instructed her regarding the order and course of the Brissot days, months, and seasons, regarding their relatives in the province and their relatives in Paris, their duties of kinship, their calls, their dinners, and the endless chain of those social tasks, about which the women complained, and of which they were very proud, because the harassment of this perpetual activity gave them the illusion that they were being of some service. This mechanical life, these false relationships, this perpetual convention, were all intolerable to Annette. Everything seemed regulated in advance: work and pleasure,—for they had their pleasures too,—but regulated in advance! . . . Hurrah for unforeseen ills that released one from the program! But there was little hope of release, even on the score of ills. Annette felt herself bricked in, like a stone in a wall! Sand and lime. Roman cement. Brissot mortar. . . .
She exaggerated the rigorousness of this life. Chance and the unexpected played their parts in it, as in all lives. The Mesdames Brissot were more redoubtable in words than in fact; they pretended to direct everything; but it was not impossible, if one attacked their weak spots, anointed them, flattered and worshipped them, to lead them by the nose; a cunning girl might have said to herself, while evaluating them at their proper worth:
"Keep on talking! I'll do things my own way!"
One would have thought that a tenacious energy, like Annette's, could never be stifled. But Annette was passing through that nervous fever of women who, by dint of staring too fixedly at the object which preoccupies them, cease to see it as it is. From a few words heard during the daytime, she forged monsters when she was alone at night. She was appalled at the battle which she had to wage continually, and she repeated to herself that she would never succeed in defending herself against them all. She did not feel strong enough. She mistrusted her own energy. She was afraid of her own nature, of those unexpected oscillations by which her troubled mind continued to be shaken, of those sharp gusts that she could not explain. And, indeed, they sprang from the complexity of her rich being whose new harmony could be slowly realized only by living; but, in the meantime, there was danger of their plunging her into many surprises of violence and weakness, of the flesh and of the mind, of the insidious hazards of fate, ambushed beneath the stones of the road. . . .
The basis of her trouble was that she was no longer sure of her love. She no longer knew. . . . She no longer loved, and yet she still loved. Her mind and heart—her mind and senses—were at battle. The mind saw too clearly; it was disillusioned. But the heart was not; and the body was irritated when it saw that it was going to lose what it coveted; passion grumbled:
"I do not want to renounce! . . ."