At this time Madame Desvarennes was really in the zenith of womanly splendor.  She seemed taller, her figure had straightened, vigorous and powerful.  Her gray hair gave her face a majestic appearance.  Always surrounded by a court of clients and friends, she seemed like a sovereign.  The fortune of the firm was not to be computed.  It was said Madame Desvarennes did not know how rich she was.

Jeanne and Micheline grew up amid this colossal prosperity.  The one, tall, brown-haired, with blue eyes changing like the sea; the other, fragile, fair, with dark dreamy eyes.  Jeanne, proud, capricious, and inconstant; Micheline, simple, sweet, and tenacious.  The brunette inherited from her reckless father and her fanciful mother a violent and passionate nature; the blonde was tractable and good like Michel, but resolute and firm like Madame Desvarennes.  These two opposite natures were congenial, Micheline sincerely loving Jeanne, and Jeanne feeling the necessity of living amicably with Micheline, her mother’s idol, but inwardly enduring with difficulty the inequalities which began to exhibit themselves in the manner with which the intimates of the house treated the one and the other.  She found these flatteries wounding, and thought Madame Desvarennes’s preferences for Micheline unjust.

All these accumulated grievances made Jeanne conceive the wish one morning of leaving the house where she had been brought up, and where she now felt humiliated.  Pretending to long to go to England to see that rich relative of her father, who, knowing her to be in a brilliant society, had taken notice of her, she asked Madame Desvarennes to allow her to spend a few weeks from home.  She wished to try the ground in England, and see what she might expect in the future from her family.  Madame Desvarennes lent herself to this whim, not guessing the young girl’s real motive; and Jeanne, well attended, went to her aunt’s home in England.

Madame Desvarennes, besides, had attained the summit of her hopes, and an event had just taken place which preoccupied her.  Micheline, deferring to her mother’s wishes, had decided to allow herself to be betrothed to Pierre Delarue, who had just lost his mother, and whose business improved daily.  The young girl, accustomed to treat Pierre like a brother, had easily consented to accept him as her future husband.

Jeanne, who had been away for six months, had returned sobered and disillusioned about her family.  She had found them kind and affable, had received many compliments on her beauty, which was really remarkable, but had not met with any encouragement in her desires for independence.  She came home resolved not to leave until she married.  She arrived in the Rue Saint-Dominique at the moment when Pierre Delarue, thirsting with ambition, was leaving his betrothed, his relatives, and gay Paris to undertake engineering work on the coasts of Algeria and Tunis that would raise him above his rivals.  In leaving, the young