ve
banished him from Paris for a few days, and, as frequently happens in
solitude, the fair Madame Jenkins' thoughts have assumed that serious
cast, that analytical tendency which sometimes makes a brief separation
fatal to the most united households. United they had not been for a long
time. They met only at table, before the servants, hardly spoke to each
other, unless he, the man of oleaginous manners, chose to indulge in
some brutal, uncivil remark concerning her son, her years which were
beginning to tell upon her at last, or a dress which was not becoming to
her. Always gentle and serene, she forced back her tears, submitted to
everything, pretended not to understand; not that she loved him still,
after so much cruel and contemptuous treatment, but it was the old
story, as Joe the coachman said, of "an old incubus who wants to be
married." Heretofore a terrible obstacle, the life of the legitimate
spouse, had prolonged a shameful situation. Now that the obstacle no
longer existed, she wanted to put an end to the comedy, because of
Andre, who might any day be forced to despise his mother, because of the
world which they had been deceiving for ten years, so that she never
went into society without a sinking at the heart, dreading the welcome
that would be accorded her on the morrow of a disclosure. To her hints,
her entreaties, Jenkins had replied at first with vague phrases, with
grandiloquent gestures: "Do you doubt me? Isn't our engagement sacred?"

FOOTNOTES:

[7] "How swift flies the hour
We pass in love's pleasures!
'Tis less than a moment,
Scarce more than a dream."

[8] "Time tears from our grasp
Our blissful enchantment."

He also dwelt upon the difficulty of keeping secret a ceremony of such
importance. Then he had taken refuge in malevolent silence, big with
chilling anger and violent resolutions. The duke's death, the check
thereby administered to his insane vanity, had dealt the last blow; for
disaster, which often brings together hearts that are ripe for a mutual
understanding, consummates and completes disunion. And that was a
genuine disaster. The popularity of the Jenkins Pearls suddenly
arrested, the very thorough exposure of the position of the foreign
physician, the charlatan, by old Bouchereau in the journal of the
Academy, caused the leaders of society to gaze at one another in alarm,
even paler from terror than from the absorption of arsenic into their
systems,