Overwhelmed by these plain words of startling clearness, the poor woman, pious as she was, could not pray; she sat still on her chair between her children, with her prayer-book open, but not turning its leaves; her mind was sunk in meditations as absorbing as those of her husband.  The Spanish sense of honor, the Flemish integrity, resounded in her soul with a peal louder than any organ.  The ruin of her children was accomplished!  Between them and their father’s honor she must no longer hesitate.  The necessity of a coming struggle with her husband terrified her; in her eyes he was so great, so majestic, that the mere prospect of his anger made her tremble as at a vision of the divine wrath.  She must now depart from the submission she had sacredly practised as a wife.  The interests of her children compelled her to oppose, in his most cherished tastes, the man she idolized.  Must she not daily force him back to common matters from the higher realms of Science; drag him forcibly from a smiling future and plunge him into a materialism hideous to artists and great men?  To her, Balthazar Claes was a Titan of science, a man big with glory; he could only have forgotten her for the riches of a mighty hope.  Then too, was he not profoundly wise? she had heard him talk with such good sense on every subject that he must be sincere when he declared he worked for the glory and prosperity of his family.  His love for his wife and family was not only vast, it was infinite.  That feeling could not be extinct; it was magnified, and reproduced in another form.

Noble, generous, timid as she was, she prepared herself to ring into the ears of this noble man the word and the sound of money, to show him the sores of poverty, and force him to hear cries of distress when he was listening only for the melodious voice of Fame.  Perhaps his love for her would lessen!  If she had had no children, she would bravely and joyously have welcomed the new destiny her husband was making for her.  Women who are brought up in opulence are quick to feel the emptiness of material enjoyments; and when their hearts, more wearied than withered, have once learned the happiness of a constant interchange of real feelings, they feel no shrinking from reduced outward circumstances, provided they are still acceptable to the man who has loved them.  Their wishes, their pleasures, are subordinated to the caprices of that other life outside of their own; to them the only dreadful future is to lose him.

At this moment, therefore, her children came between Pepita and her true life, just as Science had come between herself and Balthazar.  And thus, when she reached home after vespers, and threw herself into the deep armchair before the window of the parlor, she sent away her children, directing them to keep perfectly quiet, and despatched a message to her husband, through Lemulquinier, saying that she wished to see him.  But although the old valet did his best to make his master leave the laboratory, Balthazar scarcely heeded him.  Madame Claes thus gained time for reflection.  She sat thinking, paying no attention to the hour nor the light.  The thought of owing thirty thousand francs that could not be paid renewed her past anguish and joined it to that of the present and the future.  This influx of painful interests, ideas, and feelings overcame her, and she wept.