e emotion of the
stormy evening at Savigny. Thereafter, without self-examination, he
avoided seeing her again or speaking with her. Unfortunately, as they
lived in the same house, as their wives saw each other ten times a
day, chance sometimes brought them together; and this strange thing
happened--that the husband, wishing to remain virtuous, deserted his
home altogether and sought distraction elsewhere.

Claire was not astonished that it was so. She had become accustomed,
during her father's lifetime, to the constant comings and goings of a
business life; and during her husband's absences, zealously performing
her duties as wife and mother, she invented long tasks, occupations of
all sorts, walks for the child, prolonged, peaceful tarryings in the
sunlight, from which she would return home, overjoyed with the little
one's progress, deeply impressed with the gleeful enjoyment of all
infants in the fresh air, but with a touch of their radiance in the
depths of her serious eyes.

Sidonie also went out a great deal. It often happened, toward night,
that Georges's carriage, driving through the gateway, would compel
Madame Risler to step hastily aside as she was returning in a gorgeous
costume from a triumphal promenade. The boulevard, the shop-windows, the
purchases, made after long deliberation as if to enjoy to the full the
pleasure of purchasing, detained her very late. They would exchange a
bow, a cold glance at the foot of the staircase; and Georges would hurry
into his apartments, as into a place of refuge, concealing beneath a
flood of caresses, bestowed upon the child his wife held out to him, the
sudden emotion that had seized him.

Sidonie, for her part, seemed to have forgotten everything, and to have
retained no other feeling but contempt for that weak, cowardly creature.
Moreover, she had many other things to think about.

Her husband had just had a piano placed in her red salon, between the
windows.

After long hesitation she had decided to learn to sing, thinking that
it was rather late to begin to play the piano; and twice a week Madame
Dobson, a pretty, sentimental blonde, came to give her lessons from
twelve o'clock to one. In the silence of the neighborhood the a-a-a and
o-oo, persistently prolonged, repeated again and again, with windows
open, gave the factory the atmosphere of a boarding-school.

And it was in reality a schoolgirl who was practising these exercises,
an inexperienced, wavering li