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Ysabel envied her bitterly. Not because the Doña Modeste's skin was whiter than her own, for it could not be, nor her eyes greener, for they were not; but because her jewels were richer than Pio Pico's, and upon all grand occasions a string of wonderful pearls gleamed in her storm-black hair.
However, the young secretary read and re-read Modeste's letter, striving to guess the mind of its hidden writer. "There is not the least fine-writing here," he said, "she does not even talk of your genius; she speaks to your heart. In your place I should feel tempted by this fragrance of modesty, this proposed agreement "
His cold-bloodedness touched at certain points on rectitude and loyalty; his ostentation had a lining of generosity. Results, we must remember, are to the profit of society; motives concern God. But after the arrival of Modeste's letter Ernest deceived himself no longer as to Canalis.
She had seen him in one moment turn against herself. No! no one was left her!.... If she could only lay her head in Modeste's lap and be soothed while she crooned her old songs as in the nursery! But, whatever Marien or any one else might choose to say, she was no longer a baby. The bitter sense of her isolation arose in her. She could hardly breathe.
The fathers retain the inherent politeness of their vanished grandeur, like the mountain-tops still gilded by the sun when all is twilight in the valley. Ernest was at last able to slip a word into Modeste's ear, and she rose immediately. "My dear," said the duchesse, thinking she was going to dress, and pulling a bell-rope, "they shall show you your apartment."
With all the anxious solicitude of a hopeless lover, a vassal ever ready to die, like the soldiers alone and abandoned in the snows of Russia, who still cried out, "Long live the Emperor," he meditated how to capture Modeste's secret for his own private knowledge.
Jealousy is a noxious element in my soul, and you have revealed to me its strength; it is awful, it destroys everything Oh! I do not mean the jealousy of an Othello," he continued, noticing Modeste's gesture. "No, no; my thoughts were of myself: I have been so indulged on that point.
The thought of the beautiful casket which held the letters of the thousand and one women of this literary Don Juan made her smile, and she was strongly tempted to say to her father: "I am not the only one to write to him; the elite of my sex send their leaves for the laurel wreath of the poet." During this week Modeste's character underwent a transformation.
Ernest noticed that a prayer-book shook violently in the hands of a veiled woman as he passed her; as she alone kept her face hidden his suspicions were aroused, and then confirmed by Modeste's dress, which the lover's eye now scanned and noted.
The circumstances leading to the unmasking of Canalis' selfish character and to Modeste's marriage with La Briere are handled in a less Balzacian way than the introductory chapters, which, however, are more than usually tortuous.
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