Perhaps it was
the uniform, perhaps it was his sadness at going away alone, completely
alone, without a single hand to clasp his. I didn't recognize him at
first. Seeing my brother, he started toward us; but then when he saw me,
he went his own way . . . Poor man! I feel sorry for him!"
Her feminine instinct must have told her that she was talking too much,
and she cut her chatter suddenly short. The same instinct warned her
that Julio's countenance was growing more and more saturnine, and his
mouth taking a very bitter curve. She wanted to console him and added:
"What luck that you are a foreigner and will not have to go to the war!
How horrible it would be for me to lose you!" . . .
She said it sincerely. . . . A few moments before she had been envying
men, admiring the gallantry with which they were exposing their lives,
and now she was trembling before the idea that her lover might have been
one of these.
This did not please his amorous egoism--to be placed apart from the
rest as a delicate and fragile being only fit for feminine adoration. He
preferred to inspire the envy that she had felt on beholding her brother
decked out in his warlike accoutrement. It seemed to him that something
was coming between him and Marguerite that would never disappear, that
would go on expanding, repelling them in contrary directions .
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