easy.

"What is the matter, mamma?" she asked.

"It is nothing; you know that since your grandmother's death I often
have these moments of weakness."

CHAPTER V

A WANING MOON

Fixed ideas have the tenacity of incurable maladies. Once entered in the
soul they devour it, leaving it no longer free to think of anything, or
to have a taste for the least thing. Whatever she did, or wherever she
was, alone or surrounded by friends, she could no longer rid herself
of the thought that had seized her in coming home side by side with her
daughter. Could it be that Olivier, seeing them together almost every
day, thought continually of the comparison between them?

Surely he must do it in spite of himself, incessantly, himself haunted
by that unforgettable resemblance, accentuated still further by the
imitation of tone and gesture they had tried to produce. Every time he
entered she thought of that comparison; she read it in his eyes, guessed
it and pondered over it in her heart and in her mind. Then she was
tortured by a desire to hide herself, to disappear, never to show
herself again beside her daughter.

She suffered, too, in all ways, not feeling at home any more in her
own house. That pained feeling of dispossession which she had had
one evening, when all eyes were fixed on Annette under her portrait,
continued, stronger and more exasperating than before. She reproached
herself unceasingly for feeling that yearning need for deliverance,
that unspeakable desire to send her daughter away from her, like
a troublesome and tenacious guest; and she labored against it with
unconscious skill, convinced of the necessity of struggling to retain,
in spite of everything, the man she loved.

Unable to hasten Annette's marriage too urgently, because of their
recent mourning, she feared, with a confused yet dominating fear,
anything that might defeat that plan; and she sought, almost in spite
of herself, to awaken in her daughter's heart some feeling of tenderness
for the Marquis.

All the resourceful diplomacy she had employed so long to hold Olivier
now took with her a new form, shrewder, more secret, exerting itself to
kindle affection between the young people, and to keep the two men from
meeting.

As the painter, who kept regular hours of work, never breakfasted away
from home, and usually gave only his evenings to his friends, she often
invited the Marquis to breakfast. He would arrive, spreading around
him the anima