The stranger sat for a moment looking at her, then went and looked out into the red-floored passage, with a kind of insolent scrutiny. Then she made Miss Susan a mock curtsey, and sat down.
“They are welcome to have him,” she said, calmly. “What should I want him for? Even a child, a baby, should know better than to hate one; I do not like it; it is a nasty little thing--very like Gertrude, and with her ways exactly. It is hard to see your child resemble another woman; should not madame think so, if she had been like me, and had a child?”
“Look here,” Miss Susan said, going up to her, and shaking her by the shoulders, with a whiteness and force of passion about her which cowered Giovanna in spite of herself--“look here! This is how you treated your poor mother-in-law, no doubt, and drove her wild. I will not put up with it--do you hear me? I will drive you out of the house this very day, and let you do what you will and say what you will, rather than bear this. You hear me? and I mean what I say.”
Giovanna stared, blank with surprise, at the resolute old woman, who, driven beyond all patience, made this speech to her. She was astounded. She answered quite humbly, sinking her voice, “I will do what you tell me. Madame is not a fool, like my belle mère.”
“She is not a fool, either!” cried Miss Susan. “Ah, I wish now she had been! I wish I had seen your face that day! Oh, yes, you are pretty--pretty enough! but I never should have put anything in your power if I had seen your face that day.”
Giovanna gazed at her for a moment, still bewildered. Then she rose and looked at herself in the old glass, which distorted that beautiful face a little. “I am glad you find me pretty,” she said. “My face! it is not a white and red moon, like Gertrude’s, who is always praised and spoiled; but I hope it may do more for me than hers has done yet. That is what I intend. My poor pretty face--that it may win fortune yet! my face or my boy.”
Miss Susan, her passion dying out, stood and looked at this unknown creature with dismay. Her face or her boy!--what did she mean? or was there any meaning at all in these wild words--words that might be mere folly and vanity, and indeed resembled that more than anything else. Perhaps, after all, she was but a fool who required a little firmness of treatment--nothing more.