Inasmuch as
nothing of this sort had ever occurred, though indeed she must often have
pondered the success of such a manoeuvre as she lay alone absorbed in her
interminable games of patience (and though it must have plunged her in
despair from the first moment of its realisation, from the first of those
little unforeseen facts, the first word of calamitous news, whose accents
can never afterwards be expunged from the memory, everything that bears
upon it the imprint of actual, physical death, so terribly different from
the logical abstraction of its possibility) she would fall back from time
to time, to add an interest to her life, upon imagining other, minor
catastrophes, which she would follow up with passion. She would beguile
herself with a sudden suspicion that Francoise had been robbing her, that
she had set a trap to make certain, and had caught her betrayer
red-handed; and being in the habit, when she made up a game of cards by
herself, of playing her own and her adversary's hands at once, she would
first stammer out Francoise's awkward apologies, and then reply to them
with such a fiery indignation that any of us who happened to intrude upon
her at one of these moments would find her bathed in perspiration, her
eyes blazing, her false hair pushed awry and exposing the baldness of her
brows.
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