la Princesse, who has never done
aught in her life, not even brushed out her own hair of gold! She waits
for you. Where are your palace manners? Go to her, I tell you. She is of
your own people; we are not!"
The vehement, imperious phrases coursed in disorder one after another,
rapid and harsh, and vibrating with a hundred repressed emotions. He
paused one moment, doubting whether she did not play some trick upon
him; then, without a word, left her, and went rapidly through the
evening shadows.
Cigarette stood looking after him with a gaze that was very evil, almost
savage, in its wrath, in its pain, in its fiery jealousy, that ached so
hotly in her, and was chained down by that pride which was as intense in
the Vivandiere of Algeria as ever it could be in any Duchess of a Court.
Reckless, unfeminine, hardened, vitiated in much, as all her sex would
have deemed, and capable of the utmost abandonment to her passion had it
been returned, the haughty young soul of the child of the People was as
sensitively delicate in this one thing as the purest and chastest among
women could have been; she dreaded above every other thing that he
should ever suspect that she loved him, or that she desired his love.
Her honor, her generosity, her pity for him, her natural instinct to do
the thing that was right, even to her foes, any one of the unstudied and
unanalyzed qualities in her had made her serve him even at her rival's
bidding.
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