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Giselle's taste was so simple that it was a constant subject of reproach from her husband. To be sure, it was with him a general rule to find fault with her about everything. He did not spare her his reproaches on a multitude of subjects; all day long he was worrying her about small trifles with which he should have had nothing to do.
And she gave vent to her feelings in an exclamation of three syllables that she had learned from the Odinskas, which meant: "I don't care!" But this was not true. She cared very much for Giselle's good opinion, and for Madame d'Argy's friendship. She suffered much in her secret heart at the thought of having given so much pain to Fred.
Long talks ensued between the friends, in which Jacqueline poured into Giselle's ear her sad discoveries in the past, her sorrows and anxieties in the present, and her vague plans for the future. "I must go away," she said; "I must escape somewhere; I can not go on living with Madame de Nailles I should go mad, I should be tempted every day to upbraid her with her conduct."
Fred paused for half a minute, then he drew the stool in the form of an X, on which he was sitting, a little nearer to Giselle's sofa, and, lowering his voice, told her how Jacqueline had acted under his very eyes.
Do you know what should have been Giselle's fate since she has a mania about people being thoroughly acquainted before marriage? What would two or three years more or less have mattered?
His only comfort was in the thought that he had hypocritically asked Jacqueline for her literary opinion of his verses; but she could not fail, he thought, to understand. Long before an answer could have been expected, he got another letter, sky-blue this time, much longer than the first, giving him an account of Giselle's wedding.
And suddenly they became empty, gazing blankly at her, except for a little fear not quite buried deep enough with all the other emotions in Giselle's heart. Linda said, "Ramirez is boasting in town that he will carry you off from the island." "What folly!" answered the other, and in a perversity born of long restraint, she added: "He is not the man," in a jesting tone with a trembling audacity.
Giselle's short answers, prompted by fearful caution, drove her beside herself by their curtness that resembled disdain. One day she flung herself upon the chair in which her indolent sister was lying and impressed the mark of her teeth at the base of the whitest neck in Sulaco. Giselle cried out. But she had her share of the Viola heroism.
Jacqueline leaned toward him, and said firmly, but in a low voice: "If you attempt to hinder me, I swear I will tell everything." All that evening she did not leave Giselle's side for a moment, and at night she locked herself into her chamber and barricaded the door, as if a mad dog or a murderer were at large in the chateau. Giselle came into her room at an early hour.
Gould that it was because he found there, in her absence, the relief of an atmosphere of congenial sentiment in old Giorgio's austere admiration for the "English signora the benefactress"; in black-eyed Linda's voluble, torrential, passionate affection for "our Dona Emilia that angel"; in the white-throated, fair Giselle's adoring upward turn of the eyes, which then glided towards him with a sidelong, half-arch, half-candid glance, which made the doctor exclaim to himself mentally, "If I weren't what I am, old and ugly, I would think the minx is making eyes at me.
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