er mind to a serious study of him. Any lover who should
have caught the glance by which she expressed her gratitude to the
Vidame might well have been jealous of such friendship. Women are like
horses let loose on a steppe when they feel, as the Duchess felt with
the Vidame de Pamiers, that the ground is safe; at such moments they
are themselves; perhaps it pleases them to give, as it were, samples
of their tenderness in intimacy in this way. It was a guarded glance,
nothing was lost between eye and eye; there was no possibility of
reflection in any mirror. Nobody intercepted it.

"See how she has prepared herself," Rastignac said, turning to de
Marsay. "What a virginal toilette; what swan's grace in that snow-white
throat of hers! How white her gown is, and she is wearing a sash like a
little girl; she looks round like a madonna inviolate. Who would think
that you had passed that way?"

"The very reason why she looks as she does," returned de Marsay, with a
triumphant air.

The two young men exchanged a smile. Mme. de Maufrigneuse saw the smile
and guessed at their conversation, and gave the pair a broadside of her
eyes, an art acquired by Frenchwomen since the Peace, when Englishwomen
imported it into this country, together with the shape of their silver
plate, their horses and harness, and the piles of insular ice which
impart a refreshing coolness to the atmosphere of any room in which a
certain number of British females are gathered together. The young
men grew serious as a couple of clerks at the end of a homily from
headquarters before the receipt of an expected bonus.

The Duchess when she lost her heart to Victurnien had made up her
mind to play the part of romantic Innocence, a role much understudied
subsequently by other women, for the misfortune of modern youth. Her
Grace of Maufrigneuse had just come out as an angel at a moment's
notice, precisely as she meant to turn to literature and science
somewhere about her fortieth year instead of taking to devotion. She
made a point of being like nobody else. Her parts, her dresses, her
caps, opinions, toilettes, and manner of acting were all entirely new
and original. Soon after her marriage, when she was scarcely more than
a girl, she had played the part of a knowing and almost depraved woman;
she ventured on risky repartees with shallow people, and betrayed her
ignorance to those who knew better. As the date of that marriage made
it impossible to abstract one