he had heard from his mamma Emma
proved to him with a word that he was mistaken, and sent him off to his
patients.

And yet, in accord with theories she believed right, she desired to make
herself in love with him. By moonlight in the garden she recited all the
passionate rhymes she knew by heart, and, sighing, sang to him many
melancholy adagios; but she found herself as calm after this as before,
and Charles seemed no more amorous and no more moved.

When she had thus for a while struck the flint of her heart without
getting a spark, incapable, moreover, of understanding what she did not
experience as of believing anything that did not present itself in
conventional forms, she persuaded herself without difficulty that
Charles's passion was nothing very exorbitant. His outbursts became
regular; he embraced her at certain fixed times. It was one habit among
other habits, and, like a dessert, looked forward to after the monotony
of dinner.

A gamekeeper, cured by the doctor of inflammation of the lungs, had
given madame a little Italian greyhound; she took her out walking, for
she went out sometimes in order to be alone for a moment, and not to see
before her eyes the eternal garden and the dusty road. She went as far
as the beeches of Banneville, near the deserted pavilion which forms an
angle of the wall on the side of the country. Amid the vegetation of
the ditch there are long reeds with leaves that cut.

She began by looking round her to see if nothing had changed since last
she had been there. She found again in the same places the foxgloves and
wallflowers, the beds of nettles growing round the big stones, and the
patches of lichen along the three windows, whose shutters, always
closed, were rotting away on their rusty iron bars. Her thoughts,
aimless at first, wandered at random, like her greyhound, who ran round
and round in the fields, yelping after the yellow butterflies, chasing
the shrew-mice, or nibbling the poppies on the edge of a cornfield. Then
gradually her ideas took definite shape, and, sitting on the grass that
she dug up with little prods of her sunshade, Emma repeated to herself,
"Good heavens! why did I marry?"

She asked herself if by some other chance combination it would not have
been possible to meet another man; and she tried to imagine what would
have been these unrealized events, this different life, this unknown
husband. All, surely, could not be like this one. He might have been
ha