aled to her feelings; and Julie d'Aiglemont
found all the most trifling details of that journey laid up in her mind.
It was pleasant to her to recall its little incidents as they occurred
to her one by one; there were points in the road when she could even
remember the thoughts that passed through her mind when she saw them
first.

Victor had fallen violently in love with his wife since she had
recovered the freshness of her youth and all her beauty, and now he
pressed close to her side like a lover. Once he tried to put his arm
round her, but she gently disengaged herself, finding some excuse or
other for evading the harmless caress. In a little while she shrank from
the close contact with Victor, the sensation of warmth communicated by
their position. She tried to take the unoccupied place opposite, but
Victor gallantly resigned the back seat to her. For this attention she
thanked him with a sigh, whereupon he forgot himself, and the Don Juan
of the garrison construed his wife's melancholy to his own advantage,
so that at the end of the day she was compelled to speak with a firmness
which impressed him.

"You have all but killed me, dear, once already, as you know," said
she. "If I were still an inexperienced girl, I might begin to sacrifice
myself afresh; but I am a mother, I have a daughter to bring up, and I
owe as much to her as to you. Let us resign ourselves to a misfortune
which affects us both alike. You are the less to be pitied. Have you
not, as it is, found consolations which duty and the honor of both,
and (stronger still) which Nature forbids to me? Stay," she added, "you
carelessly left three letters from Mme. de Serizy in a drawer; here they
are. My silence about this matter should make it plain to you that in me
you have a wife who has plenty of indulgence and does not exact from you
the sacrifices prescribed by the law. But I have thought enough to see
that the roles of husband and wife are quite different, and that the
wife alone is predestined to misfortune. My virtue is based upon firmly
fixed and definite principles. I shall live blamelessly, but let me
live."

The Marquis was taken aback by a logic which women grasp with the clear
insight of love, and overawed by a certain dignity natural to them at
such crises. Julie's instinctive repugnance for all that jarred upon her
love and the instincts of her heart is one of the fairest qualities of
woman, and springs perhaps from a natural virtue whic