s wife give the
clerk presents? It looked queer. They decided that she must be his
lover.

He made this seem likely, so ceaselessly did he talk of her charms and
of her wit; so much so, that Binet once roughly answered him--

"What does it matter to me since I'm not in her set?"

He tortured himself to find out how he could make his declaration to
her, and always halting between the fear of displeasing her and the
shame of being such a coward, he wept with discouragement and desire.
Then he took energetic resolutions, wrote letters that he tore up, put
it off to times that he again deferred.

Often he set out with the determination to dare all; but this resolution
soon deserted him in Emma's presence, and when Charles, dropping in,
invited him to jump into his chaise to go with him to see some patient
in the neighbourhood, he at once accepted, bowed to madame, and went
out. Her husband, was he not something belonging to her? As to Emma,
she did not ask herself whether she loved. Love, she thought, must come
suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings--a hurricane of the skies,
which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf,
and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss. She did not know that on
the terrace of houses it makes lakes when the pipes are choked, and she
would thus have remained in her security when she suddenly discovered a
rent in the wall of it.

Chapter Five

It was a Sunday in February, an afternoon when the snow was falling.

They had all, Monsieur and Madame Bovary, Homais, and Monsieur Leon,
gone to see a yarn-mill that was being built in the valley a mile and a
half from Yonville. The druggist had taken Napoleon and Athalie to give
them some exercise, and Justin accompanied them, carrying the umbrellas
on his shoulder.

Nothing, however, could be less curious than this curiosity. A great
piece of waste ground, on which pell-mell, amid a mass of sand and
stones, were a few break-wheels, already rusty, surrounded by a
quadrangular building pierced by a number of little windows. The
building was unfinished; the sky could be seen through the joists of the
roofing. Attached to the stop-plank of the gable a bunch of straw mixed
with corn-ears fluttered its tricoloured ribbons in the wind.

Homais was talking. He explained to the company the future importance
of this establishment, computed the strength of the floorings, the
thickness of the walls, and regretted extreme