Page 212 - madame-bovary

and Rodolphe, walking behind her, saw between the black
cloth and the black shoe the fineness of her white stocking,
that seemed to him as if it were a part of her nakedness.
She stopped. ‘I am tired,’ she said.
‘Come, try again,’ he went on. ‘Courage!’
Then some hundred paces farther on she again stopped,
and through her veil, that fell sideways from her man’s hat
over her hips, her face appeared in a bluish transparency as
if she were floating under azure waves.
‘But where are we going?’
He did not answer. She was breathing irregularly. Rodol-
phe looked round him biting his moustache. They came to a
larger space where the coppice had been cut. They sat down
on the trunk of a fallen tree, and Rodolphe began speaking
to her of his love. He did not begin by frightening her with
compliments. He was calm, serious, melancholy.
Emma listened to him with bowed head, and stirred the
bits of wood on the ground with the tip of her foot. But at
the words, ‘Are not our destinies now one?’
‘Oh, no! she replied. ‘You know that well. It is impossible!’
She rose to go. He seized her by the wrist. She stopped. Then,
having gazed at him for a few moments with an amorous
and humid look, she said hurriedly—
‘Ah! do not speak of it again! Where are the horses? Let
us go back.’
He made a gesture of anger and annoyance. She repeat-
ed:
‘Where are the horses? Where are the horses?’
Then smiling a strange smile, his pupil fixed, his teeth

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