None of the guests who were amused by this tirade and the reply, amid the brightness of the crystal, the dresses of the women, the pyramids of fruit and the clusters of flowers, suspected the indignation which such talk aroused in Hubert. Who would notice the silent and modest youth at one end of the table? He himself, however, felt wounded to the very soul in the inmost convictions of his childhood and his youth, and he glanced by stealth at Theresa. She did not utter fifty words during this dinner. She seemed to have wandered in thought far away from the conversation which she was supposed to control, and, as though accustomed to this absence of mind, no one sought to interrupt her reverie. She used to pass whole hours in this way, absorbed in herself. Her pale complexion became warmer; the brilliancy of her eyes was, so to speak, turned within; and her teeth appeared small and close through her half-opened lips. What was she thinking of at minutes such as these, and by what secret magic were these same minutes those which acted most strongly upon the imagination of those who were sensible of her charm? A physiologist would doubtless have attributed these sudden torpors to passages of nervous emotion, were they not the token of a sensual aberration against which the poor creature struggled with all her strength. Hubert had seen in the silence of that evening only a delicate woman's disapprobation of the talk of her friends and her husband, and he had found it a supreme pleasure to go up to her and talk to her on leaving the dinner-table, at which his dearest beliefs had been wounded. He had seated himself beneath the gaze of her eyes, now limpid once more, in one of the corners of the drawing-room--an apartment furnished completely in the modern style, and which, with its opulence that made it like a little museum, its plushes, its ancient stuffs, and its Japanese trinkets, contrasted with the severe apartments in the Rue Vaneau as absolutely as the lives of Madame Castel and Madame Liauran could contrast with the life of Madame de Sauve. Instead of recognising this evident difference and making it a starting-point for studying the newness of the world in which he found himself, Hubert gave himself up to a feeling very natural in those whose childhood has been passed in an atmosphere of feminine solicitude. Accustomed by the two noble creatures who had watched over his childhood always to associate the idea of a woman with something inexpressibly delicate and pure, it was inevitable that the awakening of love should in his case be accomplished in a sort of religious and reverential emotion. He must extend to the person he loved, whoever she might be, all the devotion that he had conceived for the saints whose son he was.