own work for the opinion of others to annoy him very much.  On the other hand, before the passion for the dogaresse had possessed him, he had never loved.  Many painters are thus, satisfying with magnificent models an impetuosity of temperament which does not mount from the senses to the heart.  Accustomed to regard the human form from a certain point, they find in beauty, which would appear to us simply animal, principles of plastic emotion which at times suffice for their amorous requirements.  They are only more deeply touched by it, when to that rather coarse intoxication is joined, in the woman who inspires them, the refined graces of mind, the delicacy of elegance and the subtleties of sentiment.

Such was Madame Steno, who at once inspired the painter with a passion as complete as a first love.  It was really such.  The Countess, who was possessed of the penetration of voluptuousness, was not mistaken there.  Lydia, who was possessed of the penetration of hatred, was not mistaken either.  She knew from the first day how matters stood in the beginning, because she was as observing as she was dissimulating; then, thanks to means less hypothetic, she had always had the habit of making those abominable inquiries which are natural, we venture to avow, to nine women out of ten!  And how many men are women, too, on this point, as said the fabulist.  At school Lydia was one of those who ascended to the dormitory, or who reentered the study to rummage in the cupboards and open trunks of her companions.  When mature, never had a sealed letter passed through her hands without her having ingeniously managed to read through the envelope, or at least to guess from the postmark, the seal, the handwriting of the address, who was the author of it.  The instinct of curiosity was so strong that she could not refrain, at a telegraph office, from glancing over the shoulders of the persons before her, to learn the contents of their despatches.  She never had her hair dressed or made her toilette without minutely questioning her maid as to the goings-on in the pantry and the antechamber.  It was through a story of that kind that she learned the altercation between Florent and Gorka in the vestibule, which proves, between parentheses, that these espionages by the aid of servants are often efficacious.  But they reveal a native baseness, which will not recoil before any piece of villainy.

When Madame Maitland suspected the liaison of Madame Steno and her husband, she no more hesitated to open the latter’s secretary than she later hesitated to open the desk of her brother.  The correspondence which she read in that way was of a nature which exasperated her desire for vengeance almost to frenzy.  For not only did she acquire the evidence of a happiness shared by them which humiliated in her the woman barren in all senses of the word, a stranger to voluptuousness as well as to maternity, but she gathered from it numerous proofs that the Countess cherished, with regard to her, a scorn of race as absolute as if Venice had been a city of the United States....  That part of the Adriatic abounds in prejudices of blood, as do all countries which serve as confluents for every nation.  It is sufficient to convince one’s self of it, to have heard a Venetian treat of the Slavs as ‘Cziavoni’, and the Levantines as ‘Gregugni’.