family
quaked at the thought of confessing these things. He went from the Rue
du Bercail to the Hotel d'Esgrignon with pulses throbbing like some
girl's heart when she leaves her father's roof by stealth, not to return
again till she is a mother and her heart is broken.

Mlle. Armande had just received a charming letter, charming in its
hypocrisy. Her nephew was the happiest man under the sun. He had been to
the baths, he had been traveling in Italy with Mme. de Maufrigneuse, and
now sent his journal to his aunt. Every sentence was instinct with
love. There were enchanting descriptions of Venice, and fascinating
appreciations of the great works of Venetian art; there were most
wonderful pages full of the Duomo at Milan, and again of Florence; he
described the Apennines, and how they differed from the Alps, and how in
some village like Chiavari happiness lay all around you, ready made.

The poor aunt was under the spell. She saw the far-off country of love,
she saw, hovering above the land, the angel whose tenderness gave to
all that beauty a burning glow. She was drinking in the letter at long
draughts; how should it have been otherwise? The girl who had put love
from her was now a woman ripened by repressed and pent-up passion, by
all the longings continually and gladly offered up as a sacrifice on the
altar of the hearth. Mlle. Armande was not like the Duchess. She did not
look like an angel. She was rather like the little, straight, slim and
slender, ivory-tinted statues, which those wonderful sculptors, the
builders of cathedrals, placed here and there about the buildings. Wild
plants sometimes find a hold in the damp niches, and weave a crown of
beautiful bluebell flowers about the carved stone. At this moment the
blue buds were unfolding in the fair saint's eyes. Mlle. Armande loved
the charming couple as if they stood apart from real life; she saw
nothing wrong in a married woman's love for Victurnien; any other woman
she would have judged harshly; but in this case, not to have loved her
nephew would have been the unpardonable sin. Aunts, mothers, and sisters
have a code of their own for nephews and sons and brothers.

Mlle. Armande was in Venice; she saw the lines of fairy palaces that
stand on either side of the Grand Canal; she was sitting in Victurnien's
gondola; he was telling her what happiness it had been to feel that the
Duchess' beautiful hand lay in his own, to know that she loved him as
they floated