But she reserved all her tender effusions for the intimacy of their home, in order to calm the enthusiasm, oftentimes desperate, of this nervous man whom everything threw into a feverish excitement, this grand man, as they called him at Grenoble, who was for her only a great child whom she adored and kept in check by her girlish devotion combined with her motherly, delicate attentions.

Vaudrey, however, more ambitious to do good than to obtain power, and spending his life in the conflicts of the Chamber, saw the years slipping away without realizing that he was making any progress, not a single step forward in the direction of his goal.  Since the war, the years had passed for him as well as for those of his generation, with confusing rapidity, and suddenly, all at once, after having been in some sense slumbering, flattering himself that a man of thirty has a future before him, he was rudely awakened to the astonishing truth that he was forty.

Forty!  Sulpice had experienced a certain melancholy in advancing the figure by ten, and whatever position he had acquired within his party, within the circle of his friends, his dream was to reach still higher, he was tired of playing second-rate parts, and eager to stand before the footlights in full blaze, in the first role.

In the snug interior that Adrienne furnished, he enjoyed all material happiness.  She soothed him, brought his dreams back to the region of the real, terrified at times by his discouragements, his anger, and still more by his illusions concerning men and things.

Sulpice often reproached her for having clipped the wings of his ambition.

“I!” she would say, “it is rather the fans of your windmills that I break, you Don Quixote!”

He would then smile at her, and look earnestly into the depths of the timid creature’s lovely blue eyes, causing her to blush as if ashamed of having seemed to be witty.

Her chief aim was to be the devoted, loving friend of this man whom she thought so superior to herself, and although she was totally ignorant of political intrigues, she was by virtue of the mere instinct of love, his best and most perspicacious adviser and felt delighted only when Vaudrey, by chance, listened to her counsel.

“I love you so dearly!” she confessed with the unlimited candor of a poor creature who has but a single affection, a single pretext for loving.

He saw in the life he led, only the penumbra:  his neglected youth, his hopes fled, his fears, the disgust which at times filled him as he thought of the never-ending recommencements and trickeries of political life.  So dearly cherished, so beloved, it seemed to him, nevertheless, that his life lacked something.  He would have liked a child, a son to bring up, a domestic tie, since political conditions prevented him from accomplishing a civic duty.  Ah! yes, a son, a being to mould, a brow to kiss, a soul to fashion after the image of his own, a child who would not know all the sorrows of life that his own generation had laid on him!  Perhaps it was only a child that he needed.  Something, however, he evidently lacked.