an must go there or suffer the penalty of seeing his business
fall off. Claire innocently believed it all. When her husband had gone,
she felt sad for a moment. She would have liked so much to keep him with
her or to go out leaning on his arm, to seek enjoyment with him. But the
sight of the child, cooing in front of the fire and kicking her little
pink feet while she was being undressed, speedily soothed the mother.
Then the eloquent word "business," the merchant's reason of state, was
always at hand to help her to resign herself.

Georges and Sidonie met at the theatre. Their feeling at first when they
were together was one of satisfied vanity. People stared at them a
great deal. She was really pretty now, and her irregular but attractive
features, which required the aid of all the eccentricities of the
prevailing style in order to produce their full effect, adapted
themselves to them so perfectly that you would have said they were
invented expressly for her. In a few moments they went away, and Madame
Dobson was left alone in the box. They had hired a small suite on the
Avenue Gabriel, near the 'rond-point' of the Champs Elysees--the
dream of the young women at the Le Mire establishment--two luxuriously
furnished, quiet rooms, where the silence of the wealthy quarter,
disturbed only by passing carriages, formed a blissful surrounding for
their love.

Little by little, when she had become accustomed to her sin, she
conceived the most audacious whims. From her old working-days she had
retained in the depths of her memory the names of public balls, of
famous restaurants, where she was eager to go now, just as she
took pleasure in causing the doors to be thrown open for her at the
establishments of the great dressmakers, whose signs only she had known
in her earlier days. For what she sought above all else in this liaison
was revenge for the sorrows and humiliations of her youth. Nothing
delighted her so much, for example, when returning from an evening
drive in the Bois, as a supper at the Cafe Anglais with the sounds of
luxurious vice around her. From these repeated excursions she brought
back peculiarities of speech and behavior, equivocal songs, and a
style of dress that imported into the bourgeois atmosphere of the old
commercial house an accurate reproduction of the most advanced type of
the Paris cocotte of that period.

At the factory they began to suspect something. The women of the people,
even the poorest,