ped as if her head were swimming.
Some one was on hand to support her. She felt that a hand was holding
her arm, she heard some one whisper in her ear:

"It is too much, is it not?"

She recognized Lissac's voice.

Guy looked at her for a moment, quite prepared for this great increase
of suffering.

"Take me away," she murmured. "I can bear no more!--I can bear no more!"

She was longing to escape from all that noise, that atmosphere that
lacked air, and from Marianne's look and smile that pierced her. She
went, as if by chance, instinctively guiding Lissac, led by him to a
little, salon far from the reception rooms, and which was reserved for
her and protected by a door guarded by an usher. It might have been
thought that she expected this solitude would be necessary to her as an
escape from the fright of that reception, to which her overstrained and
sick nerves made her a prey.

In passing, Lissac had whispered to Ramel, who was at his elbow:

"Tell Sulpice that Madame Vaudrey is ill!"

"Ill?"

"You see that she is!"

When Adrienne was within the little salon hung with garnet silk
draperies, in which the candelabras and sconces were lighted, she sank
into an armchair, entirely exhausted and overwhelmed by the fearful
resistance she had made to her feelings. She remained there motionless,
her eye fixed, her face pale, and both hands resting on the arms of her
chair, abstractedly looking at the pattern of the carpet.

Guy stood near, biting his lips as he thought of the madman Vaudrey and
that wretched Marianne.

"She at least obeys her instincts! But he!"

"Ah! it is too much; yes, it is too much!" repeated Adrienne, as if
Lissac were again repeating that phrase.

It seemed to her that she had been thrust into some cowardly situation;
that she had been subjected to a shower of filth! It was hideous,
repugnant. She now saw, in the depths of her life, events that she had
never before seen; her vision had suddenly become clear. Dark details
she could now explain. Vaudrey's falsehoods were suddenly manifested.

"He lied! Ah! how he had lied!"

She recalled his anxiety to hide the journals from her, his oft-repeated
suggestions, his precautions, the increasing number of his
night-sessions that made him pale. Pale from debauchery! And she pitied
him! She begged him not to kill himself for the politics that was eating
his life. Again she saw on the lips of her _Wednesday's_ guests the
furtive smiles that