“A young person always knows too much,” declared the old lady coming to an end.
Whilst her mother spoke, Marie kept her eyes vaguely fixed on space. She once more beheld the little convent-like lodging, those narrow rooms in the Rue Durantin, where she was not even allowed to lean out of a window. It was one prolonged childhood, all sorts of prohibitions which she did not understand, lines which her mother inked out on their fashion paper, the black marks of which made her blush, lessons purified to such an extent that even her teachers were embarrassed when she questioned them. A very gentle childhood, however, the soft warm growth of a greenhouse, a waking dream in which the words uttered by the tongue, and the facts of every day life acquired ridiculous meanings. And, even at that hour as she gazed vacantly, and was filled with these recollections, a childish smile hovered about her lips, as though she had remained in ignorance spite even of her marriage.
“You will believe me if you like, sir,” said Monsieur Vuillaume, “but my daughter had not read a single novel when she was past eighteen. Is it not true, Marie?”
“I have George Sand’s works very handsomely bound,” he continued, “and in spite of her mother’s fears I decided, a few months before her marriage, to permit her to read ‘André,’ a perfectly innocent work, full of imagination, and which elevates the soul. I am for a liberal education. Literature has certainly its rights. The book produced an extraordinary effect upon her, sir. She cried all night in her sleep: which proves that there is nothing like a pure imagination to understand genius.”
“It is so beautiful!” murmured the young woman, her eyes sparkling.
But Pichon having enunciated this theory: no novels before marriage, and as many as one likes afterwards—Madame Vuillaume shook her head. She never read, and was none the worse for it. Then, Marie gently spoke of her loneliness.
“Well! I sometimes take up a book. Jules chooses them for me at the library in the Passage Choiseul. If I only played the piano!”
For some time past, Octave had felt the necessity of saying something.
“What! madame,” exclaimed he, “you do not play!”
A slight awkwardness ensued. The parents talked of a succession of unfortunate circumstances, not wishing to admit that they had not been willing to incur the expense. Madame Vuillaume, moreover, affirmed, that Marie sang in tune from her birth; when she was a child she knew all sorts of very pretty ballads, she had only to hear the tunes once to remember them; and the mother spoke of a song about Spain, the story of a captive weeping for her lover, which the child gave out with an expression that would draw tears from the hardest hearts. But Marie remained disconsolate. She let this cry escape her, as she extended her hand in the direction of the inner room, where her little one was sleeping: