It was a momentous event which had just suddenly fallen in her life so monotonous and so calm - an inconceivable, startling event, the consequences of which were to weigh heavily upon her entire future.
Staggering still, she was asking herself if she was not the victim of an hallucination, and if really there was a man who had dared to conceive and execute the audacious project of coming thus under the eyes of her mother, of declaring his love, and of asking her in return a solemn engagement. But what stupefied her more still, what confused her, was that she had actually endured such an attempt.
Under what despotic influence had she, then, fallen? To what undefinable sentiments had she obeyed? And if she had only tolerated! But she had done more: she had actually encouraged.
By detaining her mother when she wished to go home (and she had detained her), had she not said to this unknown? - "Go on, I allow it: I am listening."
And he had gone on. And she, at the moment of returning home, she had engaged herself formally to reflect, and to return the next day at a stated hour to give an answer. In a word, she had made an appointment with him.
It was enough to make her die of shame. And, as if she had needed the sound of her own words to convince herself of the reality of the fact, she kept repeating loud, "I have made an appointment - I, Gilberte, with a man whom my parents do not know, and of whose name I was still ignorant yesterday."
And yet she could not take upon herself to be indignant at the imprudent boldness of her conduct. The bitterness of the reproaches which she was addressing to herself was not sincere. She felt it so well, that at last:
"Such hypocrisy is unworthy of me." she exclaimed, "since now, still, and without the excuse of being taken by surprise, I would not act otherwise."
The fact is, the more she pondered, the less she could succeed in discovering even the shadow of any offensive intention in all that Marius de Tregars had said. By the choice of his confidant, an old man, a friend of his family, a man of the highest respectability, he had done all in his power to make his step excusable. It was impossible to doubt his sincerity, to suspect the fairness of his intentions.
Mlle. Gilberte, better than, almost any other young girl, could understand the extreme measure resorted to by M. de Tregars. By her own pride she could understand his. No more than he, in his place, would she have been willing to expose herself to a certain refusal.
What was there, then, so extraordinary in the fact of his coming directly to her, in his exposing to her frankly and loyally his situation, his projects, and his hopes?
"Good heavens!" she thought, horrified at the sentiments which she discovered in the deep recesses of her soul, "good heavens! I hardly know myself any more. Here I am actually approving what he has done!"
Well, yes, she did approve him, attracted, fascinated, by the very strangeness of the situation. Nothing seemed to her more admirable than the conduct of Marius de Tregars sacrificing his fortune and his most legitimate aspirations to the honor of his name, and condemning himself to work for his living.
"That one," she thought, "is a man; and his wife will have just cause to be proud of him."
Involuntarily she compared him to the only men she knew: to M.
Favoral, whose miserly parsimony had made his whole family wretched; to Maxence, who did not blush to feed his disorders with the fruits of his mother's and his sister's labor.
How different was Marius! If he was poor, it was of his own will.
