evening. "Go!" had been his grandfather''s reply, and M. Gillenormand had added in an aside, as he raised his eyebrows to the top of his forehead:
"Here he is passing the night out again." Mademoiselle Gillenormand had ascended to her chamber greatly puzzled, and on the staircase had dropped this exclamation:
"This is too much!"--and this interrogation:
"But where is it that he goes?" She espied some adventure of the heart, more or less illicit, a woman in the shadow, a rendezvous, a mystery, and she would not have been sorry to thrust her spectacles into the affair. Tasting a mystery resembles getting the first flavor of a scandal; sainted souls do not detest this.
There is some curiosity about scandal in the secret compartments of bigotry.
So she was the prey of a vague appetite for learning a history.
In order to get rid of this curiosity which agitated her a little beyond her wont, she took refuge in her talents, and set about scalloping, with one layer of cotton after another, one of those embroideries of the Empire and the Restoration, in which there are numerous cart-wheels. The work was clumsy, the worker cross.
She had been seated at this for several hours when the door opened.
Mademoiselle Gillenormand raised her nose. Lieutenant Theodule stood before her, making the regulation salute. She uttered a cry of delight.
One may be old, one may be a prude, one may be pious, one may be an aunt, but it is always agreeable to see a lancer enter one''s chamber.