“Failed!” cried Madame Josserand, letting herself fall on to a chair.
And, with a rough gesture, she tore the lace wrap from her head, threw her fur cloak on to the back of her chair, and appeared in a flaring dress trimmed with black satin and cut very low in the neck, looking enormous, her shoulders still beautiful, and resembling a mare’s shining flanks. Her square face, with its drooping cheeks and too big nose, expressed the tragic fury of a queen restraining herself from descending to the use of coarse, vulgar expressions.
“Ah!” said Monsieur Josserand simply, bewildered by this violent entrance.
He kept blinking his eyes and was seized with uneasiness. His wife positively crushed him when she displayed that giant throat, the full weight of which he seemed to feel on the nape of his neck. Dressed in an old thread-bare frock-coat which he was finishing to wear out at home, his face looking as though tempered and expunged by thirty-five years spent at an office desk, he watched her for a moment with his big lifeless blue eyes. Then, after thrusting his grey locks behind his ears, feeling very embarrassed and unable to find a word to say, he attempted to resume his work.
“But you do not seem to understand!” resumed Madame Josserand in a shrill voice. “I tell you that there is another marriage knocked on the head, and it is the fourth!”
“Yes, yes, I know, the fourth,” murmured he. “It is annoying, very annoying.”
And, to escape from his wife’s terrifying nudity, he turned towards his. daughters with a good-natured smile. They also were removing their lace wraps and their opera-cloaks; the elder one was in blue and the younger in pink; their dresses, too, free in cut and over-trimmed, were like a provocation. Hortense, with her sallow complexion, and her face spoilt by a nose like her mother’s, which gave her an air of disdainful obstinacy, had just turned twenty-three and looked twenty-eight; whilst Berthe, two years younger, retained all a child’s gracefulness, having, however, the same features, but more delicate and dazzlingly white, and only menaced with the coarse family mask after she entered the fifties.
“It will do no good if you go on looking at us for ever!” cried Madame Josserand. “And, for God’s sake, put your writing away; it worries my nerves!”