it."

The playgoers heard the bell ring, and left the greenroom to take their
places again. Raphael and the old merchant separated. As he entered
his box, the Marquis saw Foedora sitting exactly opposite to him on the
other side of the theatre. The Countess had probably only just come, for
she was just flinging off her scarf to leave her throat uncovered, and
was occupied with going through all the indescribable manoeuvres of a
coquette arranging herself. All eyes were turned upon her. A young peer
of France had come with her; she asked him for the lorgnette she had
given him to carry. Raphael knew the despotism to which his successor
had resigned himself, in her gestures, and in the way she treated her
companion. He was also under the spell no doubt, another dupe beating
with all the might of a real affection against the woman's cold
calculations, enduring all the tortures from which Valentin had luckily
freed himself.

Foedora's face lighted up with indescribable joy. After directing her
lorgnette upon every box in turn, to make a rapid survey of all the
dresses, she was conscious that by her toilette and her beauty she had
eclipsed the loveliest and best-dressed women in Paris. She laughed
to show her white teeth; her head with its wreath of flowers was never
still, in her quest of admiration. Her glances went from one box to
another, as she diverted herself with the awkward way in which a Russian
princess wore her bonnet, or over the utter failure of a bonnet with
which a banker's daughter had disfigured herself.

All at once she met Raphael's steady gaze and turned pale, aghast at the
intolerable contempt in her rejected lover's eyes. Not one of her exiled
suitors had failed to own her power over them; Valentin alone was proof
against her attractions. A power that can be defied with impunity is
drawing to its end. This axiom is as deeply engraved on the heart of
woman as in the minds of kings. In Raphael, therefore, Foedora saw the
deathblow of her influence and her ability to please. An epigram of his,
made at the Opera the day before, was already known in the salons of
Paris. The biting edge of that terrible speech had already given the
Countess an incurable wound. We know how to cauterize a wound, but we
know of no treatment as yet for the stab of a phrase. As every other
woman in the house looked by turns at her and at the Marquis, Foedora
would have consigned them all to the oubliettes of some Bastille; for