Hubert did not reason so much as this; but, from the first note, every letter that he received in the same handwriting became to him a person whom he would have recognised among thousands, of others. With what happiness had he dressed to go to that dinner, telling himself that he was about to see Madame de Sauve during long hours, hours which, reckoned in advance, appeared infinite to him! He had felt a somewhat angry astonishment when his mother, at the moment that he was taking leave of her, had uttered a critical observation on the familiarity that was customary in society now-a-days. Then, separated though he was by months from those events, he was able, thanks to the special imagination with which, like all very sensitive creatures, he was endowed, to recall the exact shade of emotion which had been caused him by the dinner and the evening, the demeanour of the guests and that of Theresa. It is according as we possess a greater or smaller power of imagining past pains and pleasures anew that we are beings capable of cold calculation, or slaves to our sentimental life. Alas! all Hubert's faculties conspired to rivet round his heart the bruising chain of memories that were too dear. Theresa wore, that first evening, a dress of black lace with pink knots, and, for her only ornament, a heavy bracelet of massive gold on one wrist. Her dress was not low enough to shock the young man, whose modesty was of virginal susceptibility on this point. There were some persons in the drawing-room, not one of whom, with the exception of George Liauran, was known to him. They were, for the most part, men celebrated by different titles in the society more particularly denominated Parisian by those journals which pique themselves on following the fashion. Hubert's first sensation had been a slight shock, owing merely to the fact that some of these men presented to the malevolent observer several of the little toilet heresies familiar to the more fastidious if they have gone too late into society. Such is a coat of antiquated cut, a shirt-collar badly made and worse bleached, or a neck-tie of a white that borders upon blue, and tied by an unskilful hand. These trifles inevitably appeared signs of a touch of Bohemianism--the word in which correct people confound all social irregularities--in the eyes of a young man accustomed to live under the continuous superintendence of two women of rare education, who had sought to make him something irreproachable. But these small signs of unsatisfactory dress had rendered Theresa's finished distinction still more graceful in his eyes, just as, to him, the sometimes cynical freedom of the talk uttered at table had imparted a charming significance to the silence of the mistress of the house. Madame Liauran had not been mistaken when she affirmed that there was very daring conversation at the house of the De Sauves.