.

After the fashion of country folks she asked him to have something to
drink. He said no; she insisted and at last laughingly offered to have a
glass of liqueur with him. So she went to fetch a bottle of curacoa from
the cupboard, reached down two small glasses, filled one to the brim,
poured scarcely anything into the other, and, after clinking their
glasses, carried hers to her mouth. As it was almost empty she bent back
to drink, her head thrown back, her lips pouting, her neck on the
strain. She laughed at getting none of it, while with the tip of her
tongue passing between her small teeth she licked drop by drop the
bottom of her glass.

She sat down again and took up her work, a white cotton stocking she was
darning. She worked with her head bent down; she did not speak, nor did
Charles. The air coming in under the door blew a little dust over the
flags; he watched it drift along, and heard nothing but the throbbing in
his head and the faint clucking of a hen that had laid an egg in the
yard. Emma from time to time cooled her cheeks with the palms of her
hands, and cooled these again on the knobs of the huge fire-dogs.

She complained of suffering since the beginning of the season from
giddiness; she asked if sea-baths would do her any good; she began
talking of her convent, Charles of his school; words came to them. They
went up into her bedroom. She showed him her old music-books, the little
prizes she had won, and the oak-leaf crowns, left at the bottom of a
cupboard. She spoke to him, too, of her mother, of the country, and even
showed him the bed in the garden where, on the first Friday of every
month, she gathered flowers to put on her mother's tomb. But their
gardeners had understood nothing about it; servants were so careless.
She would have dearly liked, if only for the winter, to live in town,
although the length of the fine days made the country perhaps even more
wearisome in the summer. And, according to what she was saying, her
voice was clear, sharp, or, on a sudden, all languor, lingering out in
modulations that ended almost in murmurs as she spoke to herself; now
joyous, opening big, naive eyes, then with her eyelids half closed, her
look full of boredom, her thoughts wandering.

Going home at night, Charles went over her words, one by one, trying to
recall them, to fill out their sense, that he might piece out the life
she had lived before he knew her. But he never saw her in his thoughts
ot