upright, with her arms folded like those of
Mademoiselle Georges, and you will see before you the Consul's wife,
with a boy of six, as handsome as a mother's desire, and a little
girl of four on her knees, as beautiful as the type of childhood so
laboriously sought out by the sculptor David to grace a tomb.

This beautiful family was the object of Camille's secret study. It
struck Mademoiselle des Touches that the Consul looked rather too
absent-minded for a perfectly happy man.

Although, throughout the day, the husband and wife had offered her the
pleasing spectacle of complete happiness, Camille wondered why one of
the most superior men she had ever met, and whom she had seen too
in Paris drawing-rooms, remained as Consul-General at Genoa when he
possessed a fortune of a hundred odd thousand francs a year. But, at the
same time, she had discerned, by many of the little nothings which women
perceive with the intelligence of the Arab sage in _Zadig_, that the
husband was faithfully devoted. These two handsome creatures would no
doubt love each other without a misunderstanding till the end of their
days. So Camille said to herself alternately, "What is wrong?--Nothing
is wrong," following the misleading symptoms of the Consul's demeanor;
and he, it may be said, had the absolute calmness of Englishmen, of
savages, of Orientals, and of consummate diplomatists.

In discussing literature, they spoke of the perennial stock-in-trade
of the republic of letters--woman's sin. And they presently found
themselves confronted by two opinions: When a woman sins, is the man
or the woman to blame? The three women present--the Ambassadress,
the Consul's wife, and Mademoiselle des Touches, women, of course, of
blameless reputations--were without pity for the woman. The men tried to
convince these fair flowers of their sex that some virtues might remain
in a woman after she had fallen.

"How long are we going to play at hide-and-seek in this way?" said Leon
de Lora.

"_Cara vita_, go and put your children to bed, and send me by Gina the
little black pocket-book that lies on my Boule cabinet," said the Consul
to his wife.

She rose without a reply, which shows that she loved her husband very
truly, for she already knew French enough to understand that her husband
was getting rid of her.

"I will tell you a story in which I played a part, and after that we can
discuss it, for it seems to me childish to practise with the scalpel on