at the club, around the bouillotte table, and a man must go there or suffer the penalty of seeing his business fall off.  Claire innocently believed it all.  When her husband had gone, she felt sad for a moment.  She would have liked so much to keep him with her or to go out leaning on his arm, to seek enjoyment with him.  But the sight of the child, cooing in front of the fire and kicking her little pink feet while she was being undressed, speedily soothed the mother.  Then the eloquent word “business,” the merchant’s reason of state, was always at hand to help her to resign herself.

Georges and Sidonie met at the theatre.  Their feeling at first when they were together was one of satisfied vanity.  People stared at them a great deal.  She was really pretty now, and her irregular but attractive features, which required the aid of all the eccentricities of the prevailing style in order to produce their full effect, adapted themselves to them so perfectly that you would have said they were invented expressly for her.  In a few moments they went away, and Madame Dobson was left alone in the box.  They had hired a small suite on the Avenue Gabriel, near the ‘rond-point’ of the Champs Elysees—­the dream of the young women at the Le Mire establishment—­two luxuriously furnished, quiet rooms, where the silence of the wealthy quarter, disturbed only by passing carriages, formed a blissful surrounding for their love.

Little by little, when she had become accustomed to her sin, she conceived the most audacious whims.  From her old working-days she had retained in the depths of her memory the names of public balls, of famous restaurants, where she was eager to go now, just as she took pleasure in causing the doors to be thrown open for her at the establishments of the great dressmakers, whose signs only she had known in her earlier days.  For what she sought above all else in this liaison was revenge for the sorrows and humiliations of her youth.  Nothing delighted her so much, for example, when returning from an evening drive in the Bois, as a supper at the Cafe Anglais with the sounds of luxurious vice around her.  From these repeated excursions she brought back peculiarities of speech and behavior, equivocal songs, and a style of dress that imported into the bourgeois atmosphere of the old commercial house an accurate reproduction of the most advanced type of the Paris cocotte of that period.

At the factory they began to suspect something.  The women of the people, even the poorest, are so quick at picking a costume to pieces!  When Madame Risler went out, about three o’clock, fifty pairs of sharp, envious eyes, lying in ambush at the windows of the polishing-shop, watched her pass, penetrating to the lowest depths of her guilty conscience through her black velvet dolman and her cuirass of sparkling jet.

Although she did not suspect it, all the secrets of that mad brain were flying about her like the ribbons that played upon her bare neck; and her daintily-shod feet, in their bronzed boots with ten buttons, told the story of all sorts of clandestine expeditions, of the carpeted stairways they ascended at night on their way to supper, and the warm fur robes in which they were wrapped when the coupe made the circuit of the lake in the darkness dotted with lanterns.