“Yes!” she replied, looking down.
She also had grown shy of F. Chevreuse, and seemed willing to keep out of his sight.
But to others she was perhaps rather more gay than they had known her for some time. Her mother found her at once kinder and more exacting, and complained that they seemed now to have become strangers.
“And how nervous you have grown, Annette!” she said. “You crush everything you take hold of.”
“What have I crushed, mamma?” asked the daughter, with a light laugh. “Have I made havoc among your bonnets or wine-glasses?”
“It isn't that,” Mrs. Ferrier said fretfully. “You squeeze people's hands, instead of touching them. Look at that baby's arm!” They were entertaining a baby visitor.
Annette Gerald looked as she was bid and saw the prints of her fingers on the soft little arm she had held unconsciously, and caught an only half-subsided quiver of the baby lip as the little one looked at her, all ready to cry with pain.
Every woman knows at once how she atoned for her fault, by what caresses, and petting, and protestations of sorrow, and how those faint red marks were bemoaned as if they had been the stripes of a martyr.
“If you touch any one's arm, you pinch it,” the elder lady went on. “And you take hold of your shawl and your gloves and your handkerchief as if somebody were going to pull them away from you. I've seen your nails white when you held the evening paper to read, you gripped it so; and as to taking glasses and cups at the table, I always expect to see them fly to pieces in your hands.”
“Isn't she an awful woman?” says Mrs. Annette to the baby, holding it high and looking up into its rosy, smiling face. “Isn't Annette a frightfully muscular and dangerous person, you pink of perfection? What shall we do with her? She pinches little swan's-down arms, and makes angelic babies pucker up their lips with grief, and sets tears swimming in their blue violets of eyes. We must do something dreadful to her. We must forgive her; and that is very terrible. There is nothing so crushing, baby, as to be forgiven very much.”