Odette hugged her furiously.
"Come, come, you're suffocating me. See, you've pulled my hair down again. I shall never manage to get dressed to-day. You monster, I don't want to have anything more to do with you!"
The little girl's voice became anxious; she was on the point of crying.
"Aunt Annette! Love me! . . . I want you to love me! I implore you to love me!"
Annette pressed her in her arms.
"Ah," said Odette, with a pathetic accent, "I would give my blood for you!" (A phrase from some newspaper serial she had heard read in the workroom.)
When Marc was a witness of these effusions, he pouted disdainfully; and, with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders raised, he marched off, assuming a superior air. He despised this babbling, this feminine sentimentality that poured everything out. As he declared to one of his small friends, "These women are silly."
At bottom, he was annoyed by the signs of affection that his mother lavished on Odette. When he was the object of them, he repulsed them; but it did not please him to have someone else get the benefit of them.
Of course, he had his aunt, and with her he could take his revenge. In fact, he did take it. To punish his mother's ingratitude he was ten times more lovable with Sylvie than Annette had ever seen him. But it must be admitted that, although Sylvie petted him, he was disappointed. Sylvie treated him as a child, and he could not endure it. He did not like her to imagine that she gave him pleasure by taking him every Sunday to the cake-shop. He was certainly not indifferent to the cake, but he did not like to have anyone insult him by believing that he attached any importance to it. Besides, he felt too much that his aunt regarded him as a personage of no importance: she was entirely unreserved with him, and, while Marc's curiosity was satisfied, his self-esteem was not. For he noticed the difference. It would have pleased him if Sylvie had taken him into her private life, not as a boy, but as a real man. In short, although he would not have admitted it to himself, he lost his illusions when he saw Sylvie at close range. The careless girl never suspected for a moment what was going on in the pure and troubled brain of the ten-year-old boy, the fabulous image he had manufactured of woman, and the shock of his first discoveries. Sylvie took no more account of her acts and her talk in his presence than she would have done before some pet animal. (We have no evidence, after all, that a pet animal is not often shocked.) Through an instinct of defence against the disillusionments which the damaging of his idol caused him, there unfortunately developed in him certain precocious ideas that were quite naïvely cynical, ideas upon which it is better not to dwell. He tried to appear (in his own eyes; for the present he did not think of appearing so in the eyes of others) a blasé man. But with all the blind senses of an eager and innocent child, he uneasily breathed in the enigmatical charm, the animality, of the feminine being. He felt for woman a disgusted attraction.
Attraction. Repulsion. Every real man knows them. At this period of life the dominating sentiment of the two in Marc was repulsion. But even this repulsion had a sharp savor that made the other sentiments and the children of his own age seem tasteless to him. He despised Odette and regarded this little girl as beneath his dignity.