g the day, when she
felt that there were more facilities for yielding, but, in the evening,
when alone in her apartment, this fictitious prudery disappeared. She
spent the entire evening lying upon the divan in the little boudoir,
dreaming of Octave, talking to him as if he could reply, putting into
practice again that capitulation of conscience which permits our mind to
wander on the brink of guilt, provided actions are strictly correct.

After a while this exaltation fell by degrees. When struggling
earnestly, she had regarded Octave as an enemy; but, since she had gone
to him as one passes over to the enemy, and, in her heart, had taken
part with the lover against the husband, her courage failed her as she
thought of this, and she fell, weak, guilty, and vanquished before the
combat.

When she had played with her passion, she had given Christian little
thought; she had felt it childish to bring her husband into an amusement
that she believed perfectly harmless; then, when she wished to break her
plaything, and found it made of iron and turning more and more into a
tyrannical yoke, she called to her aid the conjugal divinities, but
in too faint a voice to be heard. Now the situation had changed again.
Christian was no longer the insignificant ally that the virtuous wife
had condemned, through self-conceit, to ignorant neutrality; he was the
husband, in the hostile and fearful acceptation of the word. This man
whom she had wronged would always have law on his side.

Religion sometimes takes pity on a wayward wife, but society is always
ready to condemn her. She was his own, fastened to him by indissoluble
bonds. He had marked her with his name like a thing of his own; he
held the threads of her life in his hands; he was the dispenser of her
fortune, the judge of her actions, and the master of their fireside. She
had no dignity except through him. If he should withdraw his support for
a single day, she would fall from her position without any human power
being able to rescue her. Society closes its doors to the outcast wife,
and adds to the husband's sentence another penalty still more scathing.

Having now fallen from the sphere of illusion to that of reality,
Madame de Bergenheim was wounded at every step. A bitter feeling of
discouragement overwhelmed her, as she thought of the impossibility of
happiness to which a deplorable fatality condemned her. Marriage and
love struggled for existence, both powerless to conq