Page:The red and the black (1916).djvu/333

Rh she is! How I like her great blue eyes when I see them at close quarters, and they look at me in the way they often do? What a difference between this spring and that of last year, when I lived an unhappy life among three hundred dirty malicious hypocrites, and only kept myself afloat through sheer force of character, I was almost as malicious as they were."

"That young girl is making fun of me," Julien would think in his suspicious days. "She is acting in concert with her brother to make a fool of me. But she seems to have an absolute contempt for her brother's lack of energy. He is brave and that is all. He has not a thought which dares to deviate from the conventional. It is always I who have to take up the cudgels in his defence. A young girl of nineteen! Can one at that age act up faithfully every second of the day to the part which one has determined to play. On the other hand whenever mademoiselle de la Mole fixes her eyes on me with a singular expression comte Norbert always goes away. I think that suspicious. Ought he not to be indignant at his sister singling out a servant of her household? For that is how I heard the Duke de Chaulnes speak about me. This recollection caused anger to supersede every other emotion. It is simply a fashion for old fashioned phraseology on the part of the eccentric duke?"

"Well, she is pretty!" continued Julien with a tigerish expression, "I will have her, I will then go away, and woe to him who disturbs me in my flight."

This idea became Julien's sole preoccupation. He could not think of anything else. His days passed like hours.

Every moment when he tried to concentrate on some important matter his mind became a blank, and he would wake up a quarter of an hour afterwards with a beating heart and an anxious mind, brooding over this idea "does she love me?"