skin!"

The Baroness kept all the keener watch over her daughter, because she
considered her honor as a mother to be at stake. After all, she had
nothing else to do. Clotilde de Rupt, at this time five-and-thirty, and
as good as widowed, with a husband who turned egg-cups in every variety
of wood, who set his mind on making wheels with six spokes out
of iron-wood, and manufactured snuff-boxes for everyone of his
acquaintance, flirted in strict propriety with Amedee de Soulas. When
this young man was in the house, she alternately dismissed and recalled
her daughter, and tried to detect symptoms of jealousy in that youthful
soul, so as to have occasion to repress them. She imitated the police
in its dealings with the republicans; but she labored in vain. Rosalie
showed no symptoms of rebellion. Then the arid bigot accused her
daughter of perfect insensibility. Rosalie knew her mother well enough
to be sure that if she had thought young Monsieur de Soulas _nice_,
she would have drawn down on herself a smart reproof. Thus, to all her
mother's incitement she replied merely by such phrases as are wrongly
called Jesuitical--wrongly, because the Jesuits were strong, and such
reservations are the _chevaux de frise_ behind which weakness takes
refuge. Then the mother regarded the girl as a dissembler. If by
mischance a spark of the true nature of the Wattevilles and the Rupts
blazed out, the mother armed herself with the respect due from children
to their parents to reduce Rosalie to passive obedience.

This covert battle was carried on in the most secret seclusion of
domestic life, with closed doors. The Vicar-General, the dear Abbe
Grancey, the friend of the late Archbishop, clever as he was in his
capacity of the chief Father Confessor of the diocese, could not
discover whether the struggle had stirred up some hatred between the
mother and daughter, whether the mother were jealous in anticipation, or
whether the court Amedee was paying to the girl through her mother had
not overstepped its due limits. Being a friend of the family, neither
mother nor daughter, confessed to him. Rosalie, a little too much
harried, morally, about young de Soulas, could not abide him, to use
a homely phrase, and when he spoke to her, trying to take her heart by
surprise, she received him but coldly. This aversion, discerned only by
her mother's eyes, was a constant subject of admonition.

"Rosalie, I cannot imagine why you affect such coldness t