suffered.  When I complained (never without precaution), she turned her tongue with its triple sting against me; mingling boasts of her love with those cutting English sarcasms.  As soon as she found herself in opposition to me, she made it an amusement to hurt my feelings and humiliate my mind; she kneaded me like dough.  To any remark of mine as to keeping a medium in all things, she replied by caricaturing my ideas and exaggerating them.  When I reproached her for her manner to me, she asked if I wished her to kiss me at the opera before all Paris; and she said it so seriously that I, knowing her desire to make people talk, trembled lest she should execute her threat.  In spite of her real passion she was never meditative, self-contained, or reverent, like Henriette; on the contrary she was insatiable as a sandy soil.  Madame de Mortsauf was always composed, able to feel my soul in an accent or a glance.  Lady Dudley was never affected by a look, or a pressure of the hand, nor yet by a tender word.  No proof of love surprised her.  She felt so strong a necessity for excitement, noise, celebrity, that nothing attained to her ideal in this respect; hence her violent love, her exaggerated fancy, —­everything concerned herself and not me.

The letter you have read from Madame de Mortsauf (a light which still shone brightly on my life), a proof of how the most virtuous of women obeyed the genius of a Frenchwoman, revealing, as it did, her perpetual vigilance, her sound understanding of all my prospects—­that letter must have made you see with what care Henriette had studied my material interests, my political relations, my moral conquests, and with what ardor she took hold of my life in all permissible directions.  On such points as these Lady Dudley affected the reticence of a mere acquaintance.  She never informed herself about my affairs, nor of my likings or dislikings as a man.  Prodigal for herself without being generous, she separated too decidedly self-interest and love.  Whereas I knew very well, without proving it, that to save me a pang Henriette would have sought for me that which she would never seek for herself.  In any great and overwhelming misfortune I should have gone for counsel to Henriette, but I would have let myself be dragged to prison sooner than say a word to Lady Dudley.

Up to this point the contrast relates to feelings; but it was the same in outward things.  In France, luxury is the expression of the man, the reproduction of his ideas, of his personal poetry; it portrays the character, and gives, between lovers, a precious value to every little attention by keeping before them the dominant thought of the being loved.  But English luxury, which at first allured me by its choiceness and delicacy, proved to be mechanical also.  The thousand and one attentions shown me at Clochegourde Arabella would have considered the business of servants; each one had his own duty and speciality.  The choice of the footman was the business of her butler,