envies are met, it is between lover and mistress, friend and friend, brother and brother, sometimes, alas, father and son, mother and daughter!  Lydia had married Lincoln Maitland partly out of obedience to her brother’s wishes, partly from vanity, because the young man was an American, and because it was a sort of victory over the prejudices of race, of which she thought constantly, but of which she never spoke.

It required only three months of married life to perceive that Maitland could not forgive himself for that marriage.  Although he affected to scorn his compatriots, and although at heart he did not share any of the views of the country in which he had not set foot since his fifth year, he could not hear remarks made in New York upon that marriage without a pang.  He disliked Lydia for the humiliation, and she felt it.  The birth of a child would no doubt have modified that feeling, and, if it would not have removed it, would at least have softened the embittered heart of the young wife.  But no child was born to them.  They had not returned from their wedding tour, upon which Florent accompanied them, before their lives rolled along in that silence which forms the base of all those households in which husband and wife, according to a simple and grand expression of the people, do not live heart against heart.

After the journey through Spain, which should have been one continued enchantment, the wife became jealous of the evident preference which Florent showed for Maitland.  For the first time she perceived the hold which that impassioned friendship had taken upon her brother’s heart.  He loved her, too, but with a secondary love.  The comparison annoyed her daily, hourly, and it did not fail to become a real wound.  Returned to Paris, where they spent almost three years, that wound was increased by the sole fact that the puissant individuality of the painter speedily relegated to the shade the individuality of his wife, simply, almost mechanically, like a large tree which pushes a smaller one into the background.  The composite society of artists, amateurs, and writers who visited Lincoln came there only for him.  The house they had rented was rented only for him.  The journeys they made were for him.  In short, Lydia was borne away, like Florent, in the orbit of the most despotic force in the world—­that of a celebrated talent.  An entire book would be required to paint in their daily truth the continued humiliations which brought the young wife to detest that talent and that celebrity with as much ardor as Florent worshipped them.  She remained, however, an honest woman, in the sense in which the word is construed by the world, which sums up woman’s entire dishonor in errors of love.