her own letter to the baroness crashed
sentence upon sentence, in retort, springing up with the combative
instinct of a beast, to make discord of the stuff she read, and deride
it. Twice she went over the lines with this defensive accompaniment;
then they laid octopus-limbs on her. The writing struck chill as
a glacier cave. Oh, what an answer to that letter of fervid
respectfulness, of innocent supplication for maternal affection, for
some degree of benignant friendship!

The baroness coldly stated, that she had arrived in the city to do
her best in assisting to arrange matters which had come to a most
unfortunate and impracticable pass. She alluded to her established
friendship for Alvan, but it was chiefly in the interests of Clotilde
that the latter was requested to perceive the necessity for bringing
her relations with Dr. Alvan to an end in the discreetest manner now
possible to the circumstances. This, the baroness pursued, could only
be done by her intervention, and her friendship for Dr. Alvan had
caused her to undertake the little agreeable office. For which purpose,
promising her an exemption from anything in the nature of tragedy
scenes, the baroness desired Clotilde to call on her the following day
between certain specified hours of the afternoon.

That was all.

The girl in her letter to the baroness had constrained herself to write,
and therefore to think, in so beautiful a spirit of ignorant innocence,
that the vileness of an answer thus brutally throwing off the mask of
personal disinterestedness appeared to her both an abominable piece
of cynicism on the part of a scandalous old woman, and an insulting
rejection of the cover of decency proposed to the creature by a
daisy-minded maiden.

She scribbled a single line in receipt of the letter and signed her
initials.

'The woman is hateful!' she said to her father; she was ready to agree
with him about the woman and Alvan. She was ashamed to have hoped
anything of the woman, and stamped down her disappointment under a
vehement indignation, that disfigured the man as well. He had put the
matter into the hands of this most detestable of women, to settle it
as she might think best! He and she!--the miserable old thing with her
ancient arts and cajoleries had lured him back! She had him fast again,
in spite of--for who could tell? perhaps by reason of her dirty habits:
she smoked dragoon cigars! All day she was emitting tobacco-smoke; it
was notorious,