He would not long persist in enquiring how Marianne Kayser had procured all those baubles that so highly incensed the puritan instincts of her honest uncle.  He found himself urged forward with profound delight in this adventure whose mysterious features pleased him.  Bah! the very fact that he found so much inexplicable in the life of this woman enticed him all the more.  It seemed to him that not only had he entered upon a romantic course, but that he was himself the hero of the romance.  Never, in the days when he rolled about, an unknown student, on the Parisian wave, and had lifted his thoughts toward some pale patrician girl, toward some pretty creature he had caught a glimpse of, leaning back in a dark-blue coupe, or framed in by the red velvet hangings of a proscenium box, had he more perfectly incarnated the ideal of his desire than in so charming a creature.  Dreams of power, visions of love of his twentieth year, had now become tangible to him and at forty he stretched out his feverish hand toward them all.

“Could Ramel have been right?” he said to himself, “and I, only a provincial, athirst for Parisine?  But what matter?  Let Mademoiselle Kayser be what she will and I what I may be, it seems to me that I have never loved any one as I love this woman.”

“Not even Adrienne,” added a faint, trembling voice from within.  But Sulpice had a ready answer to stifle it:  Adrienne could not be compared with any creature in the world.  Adrienne was the charm, the daily comfort of the domestic hearth.  She was the wife, not the “woman.”  She was the darling, not the love.  Vaudrey would have severed one of his arms to spare her any heavy sorrow, but he was not anxious about Adrienne.  She knew nothing, she would know nothing.  And what fault, moreover, had he committed hitherto?  In that word hitherto, a host of mental reservations were involved that Sulpice would gladly have obliterated with his nails, he was ready to cry out with the same good faith,—­that of the husband who deceives the wife whom he loves: 

“What wrong have I done?”

One afternoon,—­there was no session of the Chamber that day,—­Marianne was seated in her little salon.  She was warming the tips of her slippers, that furtively peeped from beneath the lace of her skirt as a little bird might protrude its beak from a nest, her right leg crossed over the other, and she appeared to be musing, her chin resting on her delicate hand.

She was weary.  Justine, her recently engaged femme de chambre, who, like the silverware, was provided by the Dujarrier, came to announce with the discreet, bantering little smile of servants, that Monsieur Dachet, the upholsterer, had called twice.

“The upholsterer!”

Marianne frowned slightly.

“What did he say?”

“Nothing, that he would return to-morrow.”

“You call that nothing?” said Marianne, with a short laugh.