Often he remained twenty-four hours without coming to the Rue St. Gilles; and then Mme. Favoral spent the night in the most fearful anxiety. Then, suddenly, at some hour when he knew his father to be absent, he would appear, and, taking his mother to one side: “I very much want a few louis,” he would say in a sheepish tone. She gave them to him; and she kept giving them so long as she had any, not, however, without observing timidly to him that Gilberte and herself could not earn very much. Until finally one evening, and to a last demand: “Alas!” she answered sorrowfully, “I have nothing left, and it is only on Monday that we are to take our work back. Couldn’t you wait until then?” He could not wait: he was expected for a game. Blind devotion begets ferocious egotism. He wanted his mother to go out and borrow the money from the grocer or the butcher. She was hesitating. He spoke louder. Then Mlle. Gilberte appeared. “Have you, then, really no heart?” she said. “It seems to me, that, if I were a man, I would not ask my mother and sister to work for me.” XII Gilberte Favoral had just completed her eighteenth year. Rather tall, slender, her every motion betrayed the admirable proportions of her figure, and had that grace which results from the harmonious blending of litheness and strength. She did not strike at first sight; but soon a penetrating and indefinable charm arose from her whole person; and one knew not which to admire most,--the exquisite perfections of her figure, the divine roundness of her neck, her aerial carriage, or the placid ingenuousness of her attitudes. She could not be called beautiful, inasmuch as her features lacked regularity; but the extreme mobility of her countenance, upon which could be read all the emotions of her soul, had an irresistible seduction. Her large eyes, of velvety blue, had untold depths and an incredible intensity of expression; the imperceptible quiver of her rosy nostrils revealed an untamable pride; and the smile that played upon her lips told her immense contempt for every thing mean and small. But her real beauty was her hair,--of a blonde so luminous that it seemed powdered with diamond-dust; so thick and so long, that to be able to twist and confine it, she had to cut off heavy locks of it to the very root. Alone, in the house, she did not tremble at her father’s voice. The studied despotism which had subdued Mme. Favoral had revolted her, and her energy had become tempered under the same system of oppression which had unnerved Maxence. Whilst her mother and her brother lied with that quiet impudence of the slave, whose sole weapon is duplicity, Gilberte preserved a sullen silence. And if complicity was imposed upon her by circumstances, if she had to maintain a falsehood, each word cost her such a painful effort, that her features became visibly altered.