, and she played cards with him. She waited
on him carefully when he was confined to his bed, appeared to have no
sex, and transformed herself; and though she handled him skillfully, she
seemed ingenuous and ignorant of evil. She acted like an innocent young
girl, who had just been confirmed; but for all that, she chose dangerous
hours and certain spots in which to be sentimental and to ask questions
which agitated and disconcerted him, and abandoned her slender fingers
to his feverish hands, which pressed and held them in a tender clasp.

And then, there were wild declarations of love, prayers and sobs which
frightened her; wild _adieux_, which were not followed by his departure,
but which brought about a touching reconciliation and the first kiss,
and then, one night, while they were traveling together, he forced open
the door of her bedroom at the hotel, which she had locked, and came in
like a mad man. There was the phantom of violence, and the fallacious
submission of a woman, who was overcome by so much tenderness, who
rebelled no longer, but who accepted the yoke of her master and lover.
And then, the conquest of the body after the conquest of the heart,
which forged his chain link by link, pleasures which besot and corrupt
old men, and dry up their brains, until at last he allowed himself to be
induced, almost unconsciously, to make an odious and stupid will.

Informed, perhaps, by anonymous letters, or astonished because his
father kept him altogether at a distance from him, and gave no signs of
life, Monsieur de Loubancourt's son joined them in Provence. But Wanda
Pulska, who had been preparing for that attack for a long time, waited
for it fearlessly.

She did not seem disconcerted at that sudden visit, but was very
charming and affable towards the new comer, reassured him by her
careless airs of a girl, who took life as it came, and who was suffering
from the consequences of a fault, and did not trouble her head about the
future.

He envied his father, and grudged him such a treasure. Although he had
come to combat her dangerous influence, and to treat the woman, who had
assumed the place of death, and who governed her lover as his sovereign
mistress, as an enemy, he shrunk from his task, panted with desire, lost
his head, and thought of nothing but treason and of an odious
partnership.

She managed him even more easily than she had managed Monsieur de
Loubancourt, molded him just as she chose; made him