She did not wish to feel herself any longer in this
bright light, amid this stream of people, seen by
all those men who yet did not look at her. Those
days seemed far away, though in reality quite recent,
when she had sought and provoked comparison with her
daughter. Who, to-day, among the passers, thought
of comparing them? Only one person had thought
of it, perhaps, a little while ago, in the jeweler’s
shop. He? Oh, what suffering! Could
it be that he was thinking continually of that comparison?
Certainly he could not see them together without thinking
of it, and without remembering the time when she herself
had entered his house, so fresh, so pretty, so sure
of being loved!
“I feel ill,” said she. “We
will take a cab, my child.”
Annette was uneasy.
“What is the matter, mamma?” she asked.
“It is nothing; you know that since your grandmother’s
death I often have these moments of weakness.”
A WANING MOON
Fixed ideas have the tenacity of incurable maladies.
Once entered in the soul they devour it, leaving it
no longer free to think of anything, or to have a
taste for the least thing. Whatever she did, or
wherever she was, alone or surrounded by friends,
she could no longer rid herself of the thought that
had seized her in coming home side by side with her
daughter. Could it be that Olivier, seeing them
together almost every day, thought continually of
the comparison between them?
Surely he must do it in spite of himself, incessantly,
himself haunted by that unforgettable resemblance,
accentuated still further by the imitation of tone
and gesture they had tried to produce. Every time
he entered she thought of that comparison; she read
it in his eyes, guessed it and pondered over it in
her heart and in her mind. Then she was tortured
by a desire to hide herself, to disappear, never to
show herself again beside her daughter.
She suffered, too, in all ways, not feeling at home
any more in her own house. That pained feeling
of dispossession which she had had one evening, when
all eyes were fixed on Annette under her portrait,
continued, stronger and more exasperating than before.
She reproached herself unceasingly for feeling that
yearning need for deliverance, that unspeakable desire
to send her daughter away from her, like a troublesome
and tenacious guest; and she labored against it with
unconscious skill, convinced of the necessity of struggling
to retain, in spite of everything, the man she loved.
Unable to hasten Annette’s marriage too urgently,
because of their recent mourning, she feared, with
a confused yet dominating fear, anything that might
defeat that plan; and she sought, almost in spite
of herself, to awaken in her daughter’s heart
some feeling of tenderness for the Marquis.
All the resourceful diplomacy she had employed so
long to hold Olivier now took with her a new form,
shrewder, more secret, exerting itself to kindle affection
between the young people, and to keep the two men from
meeting.
