self, much pleased with his
acquisition, while she, as she took the cheque out of the glove into
which it had been slipped, and looked again at the satisfactory figure,
was thinking What a delightful man!' She had no remorse, not even the
slight recoil which comes from the mere fact that the thing is done. A
woman has not these feelings. She wears natural blinkers, which prevent
her from, seeing anything but the thing which she desires at the moment,
and keep her from the reflections which at the critical moment embarrass
a man. She thought at intervals, of course, of her husband's anger
when he discovered the theft, but she saw it, as it were, dim in the
distance. Nay, it was rather a satisfaction to add this to all she had
gone through since yesterday, and say to herself, 'I can bear it for my
child!'

For beneath her outward calm, her external envelope as a woman of
Academic fashion, lay a certain thing that exists in all women,
fashionable or not, and that thing is passion. It is the pedal which
works the feminine instrument, not always discovered by the husband or
the lover, but always by the son. In the dull story with no love in it,
which makes up the life of many a woman, the son is the hero and the
principal character. To her beloved Paul, especially since he had
reached manhood, Madame Astier owed the only genuine emotions of her
life, the delightful anguish of the waiting, the chill in the pale
cheeks and the heat in the hollow of the hand, the supernatural
intuitions which, before the carriage is at the door, give the
infallible warning that 'he comes,'--things which she had never known
even in the early years of her married life or in the days when people
called her imprudent, and her husband used to say with simplicity, 'It's
odd; I never smoke, and my wife's veils smell of tobacco.'

When she reached her son's, and the first pull of the bell was not
answered, her anxiety rose to distraction. The little mansion showed no
sign of life from the ground to the ornamental roof-ridge, and, in spite
of its much-admired style, had to her eyes a sinister appearance,
as also had the adjoining lodging-house, not less architecturally
admirable, but showing bills all along the high mullioned windows of its
two upper storeys, 'To let; To let; To let.' At the second pull, which
produced a tremendous ring, Stenne, the impudent little man-servant,
looking very spruce in his close-fitting sky-blue livery, appeared at
last