"We _will_!" screamed their offspring.

Nevertheless they could not, for the French law gives almost absolute
power to parents. Mademoiselle would have no _dot_ unless her
father chose to give her one, and no French marriage is legal without
paternal consent or the almost disgraceful expedient of _sommations
respectueuses_. Mademoiselle threatened to enter a convent. Cafétier
assured her that no convent opens cordial doors to _dot_less girls.

Juliet was ready to defy all the Capulets when she had seen Romeo but
once; Corinne was ready to fling all her laurels at Oswald's feet at
their second interview; Rosamond Vincy planned her house-furnishing
during her second meeting with Lydgate; even Dorothea Brooke felt a
"trembling hope" the very next day after her first sight of Mr.
Casaubon. How, then, could one expect poor Clothilde to yield up her
undersized, thin-moustached, and very unheroic-looking Henri, having
seen him _four_ times?

There was one way out of her troubles,--that to which Alphonse Daudet's
and André Theuriet's people gravitate as needles to their pole. She
walked one dark midnight upon the jetty alone. Nobody saw the end; but
the next Sunday, three weeks to a day from the one when the two had
countermarched in matrimonial procession, Mademoiselle Clothilde was
laid in her grave.

The whole French social system revolves around the _dot_.

"How dare you speak to my father so!" I once heard a daughter reproach
her mother. "How dare you, who brought him no _dot_!"