Mathilde, accustomed all her life to receive information from her mother, received this; and for the first time felt the egotism of her beauty awake, a sense of her own importance the more vivid because she had always been humble-minded.

She did not look at her mother; she sat up very straight and stared as if at new fields before her, while a faint smile flickered at the corners of her mouth--a smile of an awakening sense of power.
"What you have," Adelaide went on, "ought to bring great happiness, great position, great love; and how can I let you throw yourself away at eighteen on a commonplace boy with a glib tongue and a high opinion of himself?
Don't tell me that it will make you happy.

That would be the worst of all, if you turned out to be so limited that you were satisfied,--that would be a living death.

O my darling, I give you my word that if you will give up this idea, ten years from now, when you see this boy, still glib, still vain, and perhaps a little fat, you will actually shudder when you think how near he came to cutting you off from the wonderful, full life that you were entitled to." And then, as if she could not hope to better this, Adelaide sprang up, and left the girl alone.
Mathilde rose, too, and looked at herself in the glass.

She was stirred, she was changed, she was awakened, but awakened to something her mother had not counted on.