For the first time she perceived the hold
which that impassioned friendship had taken upon her brother's heart. He
loved her, too, but with a secondary love. The comparison annoyed her
daily, hourly, and it did not fail to become a real wound. Returned to
Paris, where they spent almost three years, that wound was increased by
the sole fact that the puissant individuality of the painter speedily
relegated to the shade the individuality of his wife, simply, almost
mechanically, like a large tree which pushes a smaller one into the
background. The composite society of artists, amateurs, and writers who
visited Lincoln came there only for him. The house they had rented was
rented only for him. The journeys they made were for him. In short, Lydia
was borne away, like Florent, in the orbit of the most despotic force in
the world--that of a celebrated talent. An entire book would be required
to paint in their daily truth the continued humiliations which brought
the young wife to detest that talent and that celebrity with as much
ardor as Florent worshipped them. She remained, however, an honest woman,
in the sense in which the word is construed by the world, which sums up
woman's entire dishonor in errors of love.

But within Lydia's breast grew a rooted aversion toward Lincoln. She
detested him for the pure blood which made of that large, fair, and
robust man so admirable a type of Anglo-Saxon beauty, by the side of her,
so thin, so insignificant indeed, in spite of the grace of her pretty,
dark face. She detested him for his taste, for the original elegance with
which he understood how to adorn the places in which he lived, while she
maintained within her a barbarous lack of taste for the least arrangement
of materials and of colors. When she was forced to acknowledge progress
in the painter, bitter hatred entered her heart. When he lamented over
his work, and when she saw him a prey to the dolorous anxiety of an
artist who doubts himself, she experienced a profound joy, marred only by
the evident sadness into which Lincoln's struggles plunged Florent. Never
had she met the eyes of Chapron fixed upon Maitland with that look of a
faithful dog which rejoices in the joy of its master, or which suffers in
his sadness, without enduring, like Alba Steno, the sensation of a
"needle in the heart."

The idolatrous worship of her brother for the painter caused her to
suffer still more as she comprehended, with the infallible perspica