leties of sentiment.

Such was Madame Steno, who at once inspired the painter with a passion as
complete as a first love. It was really such. The Countess, who was
possessed of the penetration of voluptuousness, was not mistaken there.
Lydia, who was possessed of the penetration of hatred, was not mistaken
either. She knew from the first day how matters stood in the beginning,
because she was as observing as she was dissimulating; then, thanks to
means less hypothetic, she had always had the habit of making those
abominable inquiries which are natural, we venture to avow, to nine women
out of ten! And how many men are women, too, on this point, as said the
fabulist. At school Lydia was one of those who ascended to the dormitory,
or who reentered the study to rummage in the cupboards and open trunks of
her companions. When mature, never had a sealed letter passed through her
hands without her having ingeniously managed to read through the
envelope, or at least to guess from the postmark, the seal, the
handwriting of the address, who was the author of it. The instinct of
curiosity was so strong that she could not refrain, at a telegraph
office, from glancing over the shoulders of the persons before her, to
learn the contents of their despatches. She never had her hair dressed or
made her toilette without minutely questioning her maid as to the
goings-on in the pantry and the antechamber. It was through a story of
that kind that she learned the altercation between Florent and Gorka in
the vestibule, which proves, between parentheses, that these espionages
by the aid of servants are often efficacious. But they reveal a native
baseness, which will not recoil before any piece of villainy.

When Madame Maitland suspected the liaison of Madame Steno and her
husband, she no more hesitated to open the latter's secretary than she
later hesitated to open the desk of her brother. The correspondence which
she read in that way was of a nature which exasperated her desire for
vengeance almost to frenzy. For not only did she acquire the evidence of
a happiness shared by them which humiliated in her the woman barren in
all senses of the word, a stranger to voluptuousness as well as to
maternity, but she gathered from it numerous proofs that the Countess
cherished, with regard to her, a scorn of race as absolute as if Venice
had been a city of the United States.... That part of the Adriatic
abounds in prejudices of blood, as do all countr