Then they looked at each other, their eyes meeting, their eye-brows arched high, and they laughed.
At the sort of laugh they gave, Marise burned hot all over, although she had no idea of what there could be to laugh at. But every line of the two women's bodies and faces, the tone of their laugh, the look of their glistening, amused eyes told her that it was something they thought shameful. And she was ashamed.
Then, as she stood there, cold and burning hot, they had both as by a common impulse glanced at her as if something about her also seemed very funny to them. That glance was the worst of all—like a smear she could never wipe off.
She felt very sick, her knees shook under her. But something furious and strong inside her told her that whatever else she did, she must not let them see how sick they made her. She stood her ground, her eyes burning, utterly at a loss. What could it be? What was this awful joke they laughed at and she couldn't see?
Jeanne said, as they looked at the cat with a greedy amusement in their eyes, "Oh, she's not sick. She's looking for a husband, that's all."
Isabelle laughed again at this, and said something to Jeanne in Basque. Marise could not understand a word of this, but her hot, straining eyes, fixed on their two faces, with a helpless fascination, received another deep and indelible impression of conscious shamefulness.
Jeanne nodded and said to Marise, "I'll take her back to M. Bergeret's brother-in-law for a few days, where there are other cats, and then she'll be all right again."
She picked the cat up by the middle and held her so, while she listened to Isabelle, who now said something else in Basque, half-grinning, her lips curled in an embarrassed, half-pleased way. Jeanne glanced sharply at Marise, as if to see whether she had understood this, in spite of its being said in Basque.
Then they both went out of the room, Jeanne carrying the cat by a hard, careless grasp about her middle. Outside the door they both burst into giggles, as though they had been restraining themselves before Marise. The little girl heard
