'I desire you not to speak of Madame Napraxine!' said Yseulte, with a violence which startled herself and momentarily shook her self-control.
The child, who had ignorantly meant to atone and to console for her previous offence, was genuinely alarmed at her failure.
'I only meant that you are much prettier, much handsomer, than she is,' she stammered.
'Madame Napraxine's beauty is celebrated,' said Yseulte, with enforced calmness. 'Leave off your habit of indulging in personalities, Blanchette; it is a very vulgar fault, and it makes you malicious for the pleasure of fancying yourself witty. Come and feed my peacocks; they are birds who will recommend themselves to your esteem, for they are intensely vain, artificial, and egotistic; they believe flowers only grow that they may pull them to pieces.'
'I don't care for the peacocks,' said Blanchette. 'Drive me in the Bois in the _Daumont_ with the four white horses, and you can buy me something at Siraudin's as we go.'
Yseulte humoured the child's caprices, and drove her out into the cold sparkling air with the four white horses, with their postilions in black velvet caps and jackets, which Blanchette condescended to praise as the most _chic_ thing in all Paris. It was on the tip of her tongue to say that they were even more _chic_ than the Napraxine black horses and Russian coachman, but she restrained herself, unwilling to offend her cousin before they stopped on their return from the Bois at Giroux's, at Siraudin's, and at Fontane's, for Blanchette was too sensible to be satisfied with toys and bonbons, and set her affections on three monkeys in silver-gilt, playing at see-saw on a tree trunk of jade, with little caps made of turquoises on their heads.
When she had chattered herself tired, and the day was declining, she consented to allow herself to be driven home, and Yseulte returned alone to the Boulevard S. Germain. For the first time since her marriage her heart was heavy. The selfishness and greed of her little companion were nothing new to her, but they had been made painfully evident in that drive through Paris; and the wound which the child had given her still smarted, as the bee-sting throbs after the insect has flown away. It was not that she believed what was said; she was too loyal and too innocently sure of her husband's affection to dishonour him by such suspicion. Yet the mere knowledge that such things were said of him and herself hurt her delicacy and her pride cruelly, and she knew well that, if the Duchesse de Vannes said so, then the world said so too. And her heart contracted as she thought involuntarily, 'Why should they speak of Madame Napraxine at all in connection with me, unless--unless he had loved her?'