He remembered that on this day he had promised to go and see his niece Aline, who had just been confined.  She was the daughter of a sister who had died, and who had been very dear to him.  A little older than Maxime, she had been brought up with him.  As she grew into girlhood she developed a complicated character.  Restless and discontented, always thinking of herself, she wanted to be loved and to tyrannise.  She had also too much curiosity; dangerous experiences were an attraction to her, and with all this she was rather dry, but emotional, vindictive and high-tempered.  Still, when she chose she could be tender and attractive.  Maxime and she had played the game together, and carried it pretty far; so that it had been necessary to watch them closely.  In spite of his irony, Maxime had been caught by the dark eyes that pierced through him with their electric thrill; and Aline was irritated and attracted by Maxime’s mockery.  They had loved and quarrelled furiously, and then they had both gone on to something else.  She had shot arrows into several other hearts; and then, when she thought the right time had come,—­there is always a time for everything,—­she had married, in the most reasonable way, a successful, prosperous man of business, head of a firm which sold artistic and ecclesiastical furniture in the Rue Bonaparte.  She was about to have a child when her husband was ordered to the front.  There could be no doubt of her ardent patriotism; for self-love includes one’s country.  Clerambault would never have expected to find any sympathy in her for his theories of fraternal pity.  She had little enough for her friends, but none at all for her enemies.  She would have ground them in a mortar with the same cold satisfaction that she felt when she tormented hearts or teased insects because something or somebody had vexed her.

As the fruit within her ripened, her attention was concentrated upon it; all the strength of her heart seemed to flow inward.  The war receded; the cannon of Noyon sounded no longer in her ears.  When she spoke of the war,—­which she did less and less every day,—­you would have thought that she was talking of some distant colonial expedition.  Of course she remembered the dangers that threatened her husband, and pitied him naturally:—­“Poor dear boy!” with a little smile as much as to say, “He has not much luck.  Not very clever, you know.” ...  But she did not dwell on the subject, and, thank Heaven! it left no traces on her mind.  She had paid her score, she thought, and her conscience was at rest; now she was in haste to go back to the world’s most serious task.  One really would have supposed that the whole world hung on the egg that she was about to lay.