nly by
passing carriages, formed a blissful surrounding for their love.

Little by little, when she had become accustomed to her sin, she
conceived the most audacious whims. From her old working-days she had
retained in the depths of her memory the names of public balls, of famous
restaurants, where she was eager to go now, just as she took pleasure in
causing the doors to be thrown open for her at the establishments of the
great dressmakers, whose signs only she had known in her earlier days.
For what she sought above all else in this liaison was revenge for the
sorrows and humiliations of her youth. Nothing delighted her so much, for
example, when returning from an evening drive in the Bois, as a supper at
the Cafe Anglais with the sounds of luxurious vice around her. From these
repeated excursions she brought back peculiarities of speech and
behavior, equivocal songs, and a style of dress that imported into the
bourgeois atmosphere of the old commercial house an accurate reproduction
of the most advanced type of the Paris cocotte of that period.

At the factory they began to suspect something. The women of the people,
even the poorest, are so quick at picking a costume to pieces! When
Madame Risler went out, about three o'clock, fifty pairs of sharp,
envious eyes, lying in ambush at the windows of the polishing-shop,
watched her pass, penetrating to the lowest depths of her guilty
conscience through her black velvet dolman and her cuirass of sparkling
jet.

Although she did not suspect it, all the secrets of that mad brain were
flying about her like the ribbons that played upon her bare neck; and her
daintily-shod feet, in their bronzed boots with ten buttons, told the
story of all sorts of clandestine expeditions, of the carpeted stairways
they ascended at night on their way to supper, and the warm fur robes in
which they were wrapped when the coupe made the circuit of the lake in
the darkness dotted with lanterns.

The work-women laughed sneeringly and whispered:

"Just look at that Tata Bebelle! A fine way to dress to go out. She don't
rig herself up like that to go to mass, that's sure! To think that it
ain't three years since she used to start for the shop every morning in
an old waterproof, and two sous' worth of roasted chestnuts in her
pockets to keep her fingers warm. Now she rides in her carriage."

And amid the talc dust and the roaring of the stoves, red-hot in winter
and summer alike, more than one