Just then, the half hour struck, and her heart beat with pleasure when she heard the chimes.  She had gained half-an-hour; then it would take her a quarter of an hour to reach the Rue Miromesnil, and a few minutes more in strolling along—­an hour! a whole hour saved from her rendez-vous!  She would not stop three-quarters of an hour, and that business would be finished once more.

Oh! she disliked going there!  Just like a patient going to the dentist, so she had the intolerable recollection of all their past meetings, one a week on an average, for the last two years; and the thought that another was going to take place immediately made her shiver with misery from head to foot.  Not that it was exactly painful, like a visit to the dentist, but it was wearisome, so wearisome, so complicated, so long, so unpleasant, that anything, even a visit to the dentist would have seemed preferable to her.  She went on, however, but very slowly, stopping, sitting down, going hither and thither, but she went.  Oh! how she would have liked to miss this meeting, but she had left the unhappy viscount in the lurch, twice following, during the last month, and she did not dare to do it again so soon.  Why did she go to see him?  Oh! why?  Because she had acquired the habit of doing it, and had no reason to give poor Martelet when he wanted to know the why!  Why had she begun it?  Why?  She did not know herself, any longer.  Had she been in love with him?  Very possibly!  Not very much, but a little, a long time ago!  He was very nice, sought after, perfectly dressed, most courteous, and after the first glance, he was a perfect lover for a fashionable woman.  He had courted her for three months—­the normal period, an honorable strife and sufficient resistances—­and then she had consented, and with what emotion, what nervousness, what terrible, delightful fear, and that first meeting in his small, ground-floor bachelor rooms, in the Rue de Miromesnil.  Her heart?  What did her little heart of a woman who had been seduced, vanquished, conquered, feel when she for the first time entered the door of that house which was her nightmare?  She really did not know!  She had quite forgotten.  One remembers a fact, a date, a thing, but one hardly remembers, after the lapse of two years, what an emotion, which soon vanished, because it was very slight, was like.  But, oh! she had certainly not forgotten the others, that rosary of meetings, that road to the cross of love, and those stations, which were so monotonous, so fatiguing, so similar to each other, that she felt a nauseating taste in her mouth at what was going to happen so soon.