from the room, she would invent some pretext to escape from that
affection which she so shamefully betrayed, and which, when it touched
her, stirred her remorse to shuddering activity.

XXXVI

The miraculous part of this disorderly, abandoned life, this life of
shame and misery, was that it did not become known. Germinie allowed no
trace of anything to appear outside; she allowed nothing to rise to her
lips, nothing to be seen in her face, nothing to be noticed in her
manner, and the accursed background of her existence remained hidden
from her mistress.

It had, indeed, sometimes occurred to mademoiselle in a vague way that
her maid had some secret, something that she was concealing from her,
something that was obscure in her life. She had had moments of doubt, of
suspicion, an instinctive feeling of uneasiness, confused glimpses of
something wrong, a faint scent that eluded her and vanished in the
gloom. She had thought at times that she had stumbled upon sealed,
unresponsive recesses in the girl's heart, upon a mystery, upon some
unlighted passage of her life. Again, at times it had seemed to her that
her maid's eyes did not say what her mouth said. Involuntarily, she had
remembered a phrase that Germinie often repeated: "A sin hidden, a sin
half forgiven." But the thing that filled her thoughts above all else
was amazement that Germinie, despite the increase in her wages and the
little gifts that she gave her almost every day, never purchased
anything for her toilet, had no new dresses or linen. Where did her
money go? She had almost admitted having withdrawn her eighteen hundred
francs from the savings bank. Mademoiselle ruminated over it, then said
to herself that that was the whole of her maid's mystery; it was about
money, she was short of funds, doubtless on account of some obligations
she had entered into long ago for her family, and perhaps she had been
sending more money to "her _canaille_ of a brother-in-law." She was so
kind-hearted and had so little system! She had so little idea of the
value of a hundred-sou piece! That was all there was to it: mademoiselle
was sure of it; and as she knew the girl's obstinate nature and had no
hope of inducing her to change her mind, she said nothing to her. If
this explanation did not fully satisfy mademoiselle, she attributed what
there was strange and mysterious in her maid's behavior to her somewhat
secretive nature, which retained something of the charact