felt proud of the man whose name
she bore.

At that moment, she would fain have cried out to every one that she was
his, that she adored him, that he was her pride, even as she was his
joy! She would like to have folded him to her, to cling to his neck and
to repeat before all that crowd: _I love you!_

But she reserved all her tender effusions for the intimacy of their
home, in order to calm the enthusiasm, oftentimes desperate, of this
nervous man whom everything threw into a feverish excitement, this grand
man, as they called him at Grenoble, who was for her only a great child
whom she adored and kept in check by her girlish devotion combined with
her motherly, delicate attentions.

Vaudrey, however, more ambitious to do good than to obtain power, and
spending his life in the conflicts of the Chamber, saw the years
slipping away without realizing that he was making any progress, not a
single step forward in the direction of his goal. Since the war, the
years had passed for him as well as for those of his generation, with
confusing rapidity, and suddenly, all at once, after having been in some
sense slumbering, flattering himself that a man of thirty has a future
before him, he was rudely awakened to the astonishing truth that he was
forty.

Forty! Sulpice had experienced a certain melancholy in advancing the
figure by ten, and whatever position he had acquired within his party,
within the circle of his friends, his dream was to reach still higher,
he was tired of playing second-rate parts, and eager to stand before the
footlights in full blaze, in the first role.

In the snug interior that Adrienne furnished, he enjoyed all material
happiness. She soothed him, brought his dreams back to the region of the
real, terrified at times by his discouragements, his anger, and still
more by his illusions concerning men and things.

Sulpice often reproached her for having clipped the wings of his
ambition.

"I!" she would say, "it is rather the fans of your windmills that I
break, you Don Quixote!"

He would then smile at her, and look earnestly into the depths of the
timid creature's lovely blue eyes, causing her to blush as if ashamed of
having seemed to be witty.

Her chief aim was to be the devoted, loving friend of this man whom she
thought so superior to herself, and although she was totally ignorant of
political intrigues, she was by virtue of the mere instinct of love, his
best and most perspicacious advise