She went into her own room and shut the door sharply behind her.
All the time she was dressing she tried to rehearse her case--that it was her life, her love, her chance; but all the time she had a sickening sense that a lifted eye-brow of her mother's would make it sound childish and absurd even in her own ears.

She had counted on a long evening, but when she went down-stairs she found three or four friends of her mother's were to dine and go to the theater.

The dinner was amusing, the talk, though avowedly hampered by the presence of Mathilde, was witty and unexpected enough; but Mathilde was not amused by it, for she particularly dreaded her mother in such a mood of ruthless gaiety.

At the theater they were extremely critical, and though they missed almost the whole first act, appeared, in the entr'acte, to feel no hesitation in condemning it.

They spoke of French and Italian actors by name, laughed heartily over the playwright's conception of social usages, and made Mathilde feel as if her own unacknowledged enjoyment of the play was the guiltiest of secrets.
As they drove home, she was again alone with her mother, and she said at once the sentence she had determined on: "I don't think you understood, Mama, how seriously I meant what I said this afternoon." Mrs.Farron was bending her long-waisted figure forward to get a good look at a picture which, small, lonely, and brightly lighted, hung in a picture-dealer's window.