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He had tried with all his might to put Victorine's face and voice and sweet little form out of his thoughts, but it was beyond his power.
A winding staircase outside led to what had been the grain-chamber: this was now Jeanne's room. The room above was Victorine's, and she reached it only by a narrow, ladder-like stairway from her mother's bedroom; so the young lady's movements were kept well in sight, her mother thought.
The blossoms had all fallen from the pear-tree now, and through the thinned branches he could see Victorine's window distinctly. She could see him also. "It would be no hard thing to love such a man as he, methinks," she said to herself as she went on leisurely weaving the thick braids of her hair, and humming a song just low enough for Willan to half hear and half lose the words.
His eyes fell slowly and inimically from the brow of Whittier to the braid of reddish hair belonging to Victorine Riordan, the little octoroon girl who sat directly in front of him. Victorine's back was as familiar to Penrod as the necktie of Oliver Wendell Holmes. So was her gayly coloured plaid waist. He hated the waist as he hated Victorine herself, without knowing why.
She had come round by way of Victorine's small, tight-fenced garden of crape-myrtles, oleanders and pomegranates where also the water was in the streets, backwater from the overflowed swamp-forests between city and lake and had sent her to Charlie's bedside.
Bessemer sat in the bay window of the dining-room reading the paper from end to end. At five Travis bestirred herself. It was Victorine's afternoon out. Travis set the table, spreading a cover of blue denim edged with white braid, which showed off the silver and the set of delft her great and never-ending joy to great effect. Tea was had at half-past five.
I don't think Marie finished the sentence, if she did I did not hear her; but I remember quite well that she spoke of my distaste for cards. "You didn't play that night at Alphonsine's when I lost all my money. You preferred to look at Victorine's drawings. She has done some better ones. Go and look at them, and let's finish our game. Then I'll talk to you. So you heard about me at Alphonsine's?
Well, you can think, Mamma, we did not have an agreeable walk. Victorine talked in her most prudish goody style to "the Remorqueur," and never addressed me; while poor Mademoiselle Blanc was so nervous trying to speak to both. As we got to the turn into Vinant, Monsieur Dubois Victorine's music-master came up the street.
They were for ever linked, soaring into immortality amidst the enchantment of their union, vanquishers of death, radiant with the rapturous beauty of love, the conqueror, the immortal. But Victorine's sobs at last burst forth, mingled with such lamentations that great confusion followed.
One day I came near making myself the accomplice, as it were, of the crime which led to the opulence of the Taillefer family. I was on the point of asking the father for Victorine's hand. But I fled; I travelled; I went to Germany, to Andernach; and then I returned! I found Victorine pale, and thinner; if I had seen her well in health and gay, I should certainly have been saved.
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