could not do enough by
abandoning herself to sanctioned and sacred married love; simple and
artless, she had no coquetry, no reserves, none of the dominion which a
worldly-minded girl acquires over her husband by ingenious caprice; she
loved too well to calculate for the future, and never imagined that so
exquisite a life could come to an end. Happy in being her husband's sole
delight, she believed that her inextinguishable love would always be
her greatest grace in his eyes, as her devotion and obedience would be
a perennial charm. And, indeed, the ecstasy of love had made her so
brilliantly lovely that her beauty filled her with pride, and gave her
confidence that she could always reign over a man so easy to kindle
as Monsieur de Sommervieux. Thus her position as a wife brought her no
knowledge but the lessons of love.

In the midst of her happiness, she was still the simple child who had
lived in obscurity in the Rue Saint-Denis, and who never thought of
acquiring the manners, the information, the tone of the world she had
to live in. Her words being the words of love, she revealed in them, no
doubt, a certain pliancy of mind and a certain refinement of speech;
but she used the language common to all women when they find themselves
plunged in passion, which seems to be their element. When, by chance,
Augustine expressed an idea that did not harmonize with Theodore's, the
young artist laughed, as we laugh at the first mistakes of a foreigner,
though they end by annoying us if they are not corrected.

In spite of all this love-making, by the end of this year, as delightful
as it was swift, Sommervieux felt one morning the need for resuming his
work and his old habits. His wife was expecting their first child. He
saw some friends again. During the tedious discomforts of the year when
a young wife is nursing an infant for the first time, he worked,
no doubt, with zeal, but he occasionally sought diversion in the
fashionable world. The house which he was best pleased to frequent
was that of the Duchesse de Carigliano, who had at last attracted the
celebrated artist to her parties. When Augustine was quite well again,
and her boy no longer required the assiduous care which debars a mother
from social pleasures, Theodore had come to the stage of wishing to know
the joys of satisfied vanity to be found in society by a man who shows
himself with a handsome woman, the object of envy and admiration.

To figure in drawing-room