ual fear, mingled with some satisfactions, as she saw her worst
apprehensions unrealized.

When men like Philippe, who are endowed with physical courage, and yet
are cowardly and ignoble in their moral being, see matters and things
resuming their accustomed course about them after some catastrophe in
which their honor and decency is well-nigh lost, such family kindness,
or any show of friendliness towards them is a premium of encouragement.
They count on impunity; their minds distorted, their passions gratified,
only prompt them to study how it happened that they succeeded in getting
round all social laws; the result is they become alarmingly adroit.

A fortnight later, Philippe, once more a man of leisure, lazy and bored,
renewed his fatal cafe life,--his drams, his long games of billiards
embellished with punch, his nightly resort to the gambling-table,
where he risked some trifling stake and won enough to pay for his
dissipations. Apparently very economical, the better to deceive his
mother and Madame Descoings, he wore a hat that was greasy, with the nap
rubbed off at the edges, patched boots, a shabby overcoat, on which
the red ribbon scarcely showed so discolored and dirty was it by long
service at the buttonhole and by the spatterings of coffee and liquors.
His buckskin gloves, of a greenish tinge, lasted him a long while; and
he only gave up his satin neckcloth when it was ragged enough to look
like wadding. Mariette was the sole object of the fellow's love, and her
treachery had greatly hardened his heart. When he happened to win more
than usual, or if he supped with his old comrade, Giroudeau, he followed
some Venus of the slums, with brutal contempt for the whole sex.
Otherwise regular in his habits, he breakfasted and dined at home and
came in every night about one o'clock. Three months of this horrible
life restored Agathe to some degree of confidence.

As for Joseph, who was working at the splendid picture to which
he afterwards owed his reputation, he lived in his atelier. On the
prediction of her grandson Bixiou, Madame Descoings believed in Joseph's
future glory, and she showed him every sort of motherly kindness; she
took his breakfast to him, she did his errands, she blacked his boots.
The painter was never seen till dinner-time, and his evenings were spent
at the Cenacle among his friends. He read a great deal, and gave himself
that deep and serious education which only comes through the mind
itsel