A good work rarely goes unrewarded.  Antonino, who had never touched a piece of colored chalk to a black stone, soon revealed strong gift as a draftsman and served his new master with brightness and taste.

Left lonely by his wife, each day more and more estranged, Felix loved to labor with the youth in the tasks to both congenial.  That Cesarine should grow jealous would be natural, but it was pique that she felt toward Felix.  In Antonino, she saw the possible instrument of her vengeance.  His good looks, fervid temperament, youthful impressionability, all conspired in her favor as well as the innate artistic craving which had at the first sight lifted her on a pedestal as his ideal of the woman to be idolized.

Nevertheless, the vagabond had a stronger spirit than she anticipated, and the emotion which she set down as timidity, and which protected him from the baseness of deceiving his benefactor, was due to honor.  She flattered herself that she could pluck the fruit at any time, and, since this moneyless youth could not in the least appease her yearning for inordinate luxury, she cast about for another conquest.

Clemenceau would not hear of his home being turned into the pandemonium of a country-house receiving all “the society that amuses,” and rigidly restricted his wife from visiting where she would meet the odd medley in the suburbs of Paris.  Retired opera-singers, Bohemians who have made a fortune by chance, superseded politicians, officials who have perfected libeling into an art, and reformed female celebrities of the dancing-gardens and burlesque theatres.  But, as society is constituted, it would have earned him the reputation of a tyrant if he had refused her receiving and returning the visits of the venerable Marchioness de Latour-Lagneau, to whom the Bishop always accorded an hour during his pastoral calls.  This was a neighbor.

In her old Louis XIV. mansion, conspicuous among the new structures, the old dame, in silvered hair which needed no powder, welcomed the “best people” in the neighborhood and a surprising number of visitors who “ran down” from the city.  Considering her age, her activity in playing the hostess was remarkable.  On the other hand, the “at homes” were most respectable, and the music remained “classical;” not an echo of Offenbach or Strauss; the conversation was restrained and decorous and the scandal delicately dressed to offend no ear.

Not all were old who came to the chateau, and the foreigners were numerous to give variety to the gatherings; but the white neck-cloth and black coat suppressed gaiety in even the rising youth, who were destined for places under government or on boards of finance and commerce.

It may be judged that an afternoon spent in such company was little change to Madame Clemenceau, and that the five o’clock tea, initiated from the English, was a kind of penitential drink.  But she became a habitue, and took a very natural liking to hear again the anecdotes indicating how matters moved in Germany and Russia, where her childhood and early girlhood had passed.