"Anything
audacious was attractive to me then. But now I sometimes see through
it too easily, and want something quieter and a little more
mysterious."
"The difference between the Marchesino and Monsieur Emile?" said the
girl, with a little laugh.
Hermione laughed, too.
"Do you think Monsieur Emile mysterious?" she asked.
"Yes--certainly. Don't you?"
"I have known him so intimately for so many years."
"Well, but that does not change him. Does it?"
"No. But it may make him appear very differently to me from the way in
which he shows himself to others."
"I think if I knew Monsieur Emile for centuries I should always wonder
about him."
"What is it in Emile that makes you wonder?" asked her mother, with a
real curiosity.
"The same thing that makes me wonder when I look at a sleepy lion."
"You call Emile sleepy!" said Hermione.
"Oh, not his intellect, Madre! Of course that is horribly, horribly
wide awake."
And Vere ran off to her room, or the garden, or the Saint's Pool--who
knew where?--leaving her mother to say to herself, as she had already
said to herself in these last days of the growing summer, "When I said
that to Emile, what a fool I was!" She was thinking of her statement
that there was nothing in her child that was hidden from her.
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