it. You even boasted about it to your sister, who
told me of it, for she is fond of me and was disgusted at your boorish
coarseness.

"Ah! Remember how you have behaved in the past! How for eleven years you
have compelled me to give up all society and simply be a mother to your
children. And then you would grow disgusted with me and I was sent into
the country, the family chateau, among fields and meadows. And when I
reappeared, fresh, pretty and unspoiled, still seductive and constantly
surrounded by admirers, hoping that at last I should live a little more
like a rich young society woman, you were seized with jealousy again,
and you began once more to persecute me with that infamous and hateful
desire from which you are suffering at this moment by my side. And it is
not the desire of possessing me--for I should never have refused myself
to you, but it is the wish to make me unsightly.

"And then that abominable and mysterious thing occurred which I was a
long time in understanding (but I grew sharp by dint of watching your
thoughts and actions): You attached yourself to your children with all
the security which they gave you while I bore them. You felt affection
for them, with all your aversion to me, and in spite of your ignoble
fears, which were momentarily allayed by your pleasure in seeing me lose
my symmetry.

"Oh! how often have I noticed that joy in you! I have seen it in your
eyes and guessed it. You loved your children as victories, and not
because they were of your own blood. They were victories over me, over
my youth, over my beauty, over my charms, over the compliments which
were paid me and over those that were whispered around me without being
paid to me personally. And you are proud of them, you make a parade of
them, you take them out for drives in your break in the Bois de
Boulogne and you give them donkey rides at Montmorency. You take them
to theatrical matinees so that you may be seen in the midst of them,
so that the people may say: 'What a kind father' and that it may be
repeated----"

He had seized her wrist with savage brutality, and he squeezed it so
violently that she was quiet and nearly cried out with the pain and he
said to her in a whisper:

"I love my children, do you hear? What you have just told me is
disgraceful in a mother. But you belong to me; I am master--your
master--I can exact from you what I like and when I like--and I have the
law-on my side."

He was trying to crush