Nevertheless, it was upon the influence of her suffering that Madame Liauran almost solely relied in the campaign which she had undertaken--she, a simple woman, who knew nothing of life but its duties--against a creature whom she imagined as being at once fascinating and fatal, bewitching and deadly. She had adopted the ingenuous system which is common to all tender jealousies, and which consisted in showing her distress. She said to herself, "He will see that I am in an agony; will not that suffice?" The misfortune was that Hubert, in the intoxication of his passion, saw in his mother's distress only tyrannical injustice to a woman whom he looked upon as divine, and to a love which he considered sublime. When he returned from the Bois de Boulogne in the morning, after taking a ride on horseback and seeing Madame de Sauve pass in the carriage drawn by two grey ponies which she drove herself, he would at breakfast encounter the saddened profile of his mother, and would say to himself: "She has no right to be sad. I have not taken any of my affection from her." He reasoned instead of feeling. His mother laid her bleeding heart in the way before him and he passed it by. When he was to dine out, and his mother's good-bye at the moment of his departure forewarned him that Madame Liauran would spend an evening of melancholy in regretting him, he would think: "Yet what if she knew that Theresa reproaches me for devoting too much of my time to her love!" And it was true. His mistress had the ready generosity of women who know that they are vastly preferred, and who are very careful not to ask the man who loves them to act as they wish. There is such a delicate pleasure in leaving one's lover free, in encouraging him, even, to sacrifice you, when it is certain what his decision will be! It thus happened that Hubert would return to the house in the Rue Vaneau after having a secret meeting with Theresa during the day,--for Emmanuel Deroy had put his small bachelor abode in the Avenue Friedland at his friend's disposal. But then, whether it was that the nervous sadness which accompanies over-keen pleasures made him cruel, or that secret remorse of conscience came to torment him, or that there was too strong a contrast between the charming forms assumed by Theresa's tenderness and the sad ones in which that of Madame Liauran was arrayed, the young man became really ungrateful. Irritation, not pity, increased within him before the sorrow of her whose idolised son he nevertheless was. Marie Alice apprehended this shade of feeling, and she suffered more from it than from all the rest, not divining that the excess of her grief was an irreparable error of management, and that a demoralising comparison was being set up in Alexander Hubert's mind between the severities of his relatives and the fond delights of his chosen affection.