hey are only more deeply
touched by it, when to that rather coarse intoxication is joined, in
the woman who inspires them, the refined graces of mind, the delicacy of
elegance and the subtleties of sentiment.

Such was Madame Steno, who at once inspired the painter with a passion
as complete as a first love. It was really such. The Countess, who was
possessed of the penetration of voluptuousness, was not mistaken there.
Lydia, who was possessed of the penetration of hatred, was not mistaken
either. She knew from the first day how matters stood in the beginning,
because she was as observing as she was dissimulating; then, thanks
to means less hypothetic, she had always had the habit of making those
abominable inquiries which are natural, we venture to avow, to nine
women out of ten! And how many men are women, too, on this point, as
said the fabulist. At school Lydia was one of those who ascended to the
dormitory, or who reentered the study to rummage in the cupboards and
open trunks of her companions. When mature, never had a sealed letter
passed through her hands without her having ingeniously managed to read
through the envelope, or at least to guess from the postmark, the seal,
the handwriting of the address, who was the author of it. The instinct
of curiosity was so strong that she could not refrain, at a telegraph
office, from glancing over the shoulders of the persons before her, to
learn the contents of their despatches. She never had her hair dressed
or made her toilette without minutely questioning her maid as to the
goings-on in the pantry and the antechamber. It was through a story of
that kind that she learned the altercation between Florent and Gorka in
the vestibule, which proves, between parentheses, that these espionages
by the aid of servants are often efficacious. But they reveal a native
baseness, which will not recoil before any piece of villainy.

When Madame Maitland suspected the liaison of Madame Steno and her
husband, she no more hesitated to open the latter's secretary than she
later hesitated to open the desk of her brother. The correspondence
which she read in that way was of a nature which exasperated her
desire for vengeance almost to frenzy. For not only did she acquire the
evidence of a happiness shared by them which humiliated in her the woman
barren in all senses of the word, a stranger to voluptuousness as well
as to maternity, but she gathered from it numerous proofs that the
Countes