you. It would be rash to remain. To-morrow
at eleven o'clock bring your note of hand; at that hour that mandarin
Marneffe is at his office, Valerie is free.--Have you really asked her
to sit for your group?--Come up to my rooms first.--Ah! I was sure
of it," she added, as she caught the look which Steinbock flashed at
Valerie, "I knew you were a profligate in the bud! Well, Valerie is
lovely--but try not to bring trouble on Hortense."

Nothing annoys a married man so much as finding his wife perpetually
interposing between himself and his wishes, however transient.

Wenceslas got home at about one in the morning; Hortense had expected
him ever since half-past nine. From half-past nine till ten she had
listened to the passing carriages, telling herself that never before had
her husband come in so late from dining with Florent and Chanor. She sat
sewing by the child's cot, for she had begun to save a needlewoman's pay
for the day by doing the mending herself.--From ten till half-past, a
suspicion crossed her mind; she sat wondering:

"Is he really gone to dinner, as he told me, with Chanor and Florent? He
put on his best cravat and his handsomest pin when he dressed. He took
as long over his toilet as a woman when she wants to make the best of
herself.--I am crazy! He loves me!--And here he is!"

But instead of stopping, the cab she heard went past.

From eleven till midnight Hortense was a victim to terrible alarms; the
quarter where they lived was now deserted.

"If he has set out on foot, some accident may have happened," thought
she. "A man may be killed by tumbling over a curbstone or failing to
see a gap. Artists are so heedless! Or if he should have been stopped
by robbers!--It is the first time he has ever left me alone here for six
hours and a half!--But why should I worry myself? He cares for no one
but me."

Men ought to be faithful to the wives who love them, were it only on
account of the perpetual miracles wrought by true love in the sublime
regions of the spiritual world. The woman who loves is, in relation
to the man she loves, in the position of a somnambulist to whom the
magnetizer should give the painful power, when she ceases to be the
mirror of the world, of being conscious as a woman of what she has seen
as a somnambulist. Passion raises the nervous tension of a woman to the
ecstatic pitch at which presentiment is as acute as the insight of a
clairvoyant. A wife knows she is betrayed; she