o much in earnest in her purpose to remain
technically virtuous, that she felt that there was not the slightest
danger for her in preliminaries fraught with peril for a woman less sure
of her self-command. After all, the Duchess was practically separated
from her husband; a marriage long since annulled was no great sacrifice
to make to her love.

Montriveau on his side was quite happy to win the vaguest promise, glad
once for all to sweep aside, with all scruples of conjugal fidelity, her
stock of excuses for refusing herself to his love. He had gained ground
a little, and congratulated himself. And so for a time he took unfair
advantage of the rights so hardly won. More a boy than he had ever been
in his life, he gave himself up to all the childishness that makes first
love the flower of life. He was a child again as he poured out all
his soul, all the thwarted forces that passion had given him, upon her
hands, upon the dazzling forehead that looked so pure to his eyes; upon
her fair hair; on the tufted curls where his lips were pressed. And the
Duchess, on whom his love was poured like a flood, was vanquished by
the magnetic influence of her lover's warmth; she hesitated to begin
the quarrel that must part them forever. She was more a woman than she
thought, this slight creature, in her effort to reconcile the demands
of religion with the ever-new sensations of vanity, the semblance of
pleasure which turns a Parisienne's head. Every Sunday she went to Mass;
she never missed a service; then, when evening came, she was steeped in
the intoxicating bliss of repressed desire. Armand and Mme de Langeais,
like Hindoo fakirs, found the reward of their continence in the
temptations to which it gave rise. Possibly, the Duchess had ended by
resolving love into fraternal caresses, harmless enough, as it might
have seemed to the rest of the world, while they borrowed extremes
of degradation from the license of her thoughts. How else explain the
incomprehensible mystery of her continual fluctuations? Every morning
she proposed to herself to shut her door on the Marquis de Montriveau;
every evening, at the appointed hour, she fell under the charm of his
presence. There was a languid defence; then she grew less unkind. Her
words were sweet and soothing. They were lovers--lovers only could have
been thus. For him the Duchess would display her most sparkling wit, her
most captivating wiles; and when at last she had wrought upon his sens