e shows her uneasiness about the horse and
his fodder.--Symptom.

To these features of the case, you will be able to add others. We shall
endeavor in the present volume always to paint things in bold fresco
style and leave the miniatures to you. According to the characters
concerned, the indications which we are describing, veiled under
the incidents of ordinary life, are of infinite variety. One man may
discover a symptom in the way a shawl is put on, while another needs to
receive a fillip to his intellect, in order to notice the indifference
of his mate.

Some fine spring morning, the day after a ball, or the eve of a country
party, this situation reaches its last phase; your wife is listless
and the happiness within her reach has no more attractions for her. Her
mind, her imagination, perhaps her natural caprices call for a
lover. Nevertheless, she dare not yet embark upon an intrigue whose
consequences and details fill her with dread. You are still there for
some purpose or other; you are a weight in the balance, although a very
light one. On the other hand, the lover presents himself arrayed in all
the graces of novelty and all the charms of mystery. The conflict which
has arisen in the heart of your wife becomes, in presence of the enemy,
more real and more full of peril than before. Very soon the more dangers
and risks there are to be run, the more she burns to plunge into that
delicious gulf of fear, enjoyment, anguish and delight. Her imagination
kindles and sparkles, her future life rises before her eyes, colored
with romantic and mysterious hues. Her soul discovers that existence has
already taken its tone from this struggle which to a woman has so much
solemnity in it. All is agitation, all is fire, all is commotion within
her. She lives with three times as much intensity as before, and judges
the future by the present. The little pleasure which you have lavished
upon her bears witness against you; for she is not excited as much by
the pleasures which she has received, as by those which she is yet to
enjoy; does not imagination show her that her happiness will be keener
with this lover, whom the laws deny her, than with you? And then, she
finds enjoyment even in her terror and terror in her enjoyment. Then
she falls in love with this imminent danger, this sword of Damocles hung
over her head by you yourself, thus preferring the delirious agonies
of such a passion, to that conjugal inanity which is worse to