It was, in fact, from her mother, who, cold though she was, had been led by weariness and abandonment into guilty misconduct, that Theresa derived her dreamy imagination, while there flowed in her veins the burning blood of her true father, the handsome Count Branciforte. Further, this child of license and infatuation had been brought up without religious principles or bridle of any kind, by Adolphe Lussac, a most immoral man, who was amused by the little girl's vivacity, and had early made her a guest at many dinners, where she heard all that she ought not to have heard, and guessed all that she ought not to have known. Who can calculate the amount of influence over the falls of a woman of twenty-five that is attributable to the conversations listened to or overheard by the young girl in short frocks? Nevertheless, Theresa, who had married when very young, had had only two intrigues up to the time of her chance meeting with Hubert, and these two amours had caused her such disgust that she had sworn that she would never again fall into the folly of taking a lover. The good resolutions of a woman who has fallen, and who has suffered for her fault, are like the firm intentions of a gambler who has lost two thousand pounds, or a drunkard who has told his secrets during his intoxication. The deep-lying causes which have produced the first adultery continue to subsist after the fault has given the guilty one cruelly to taste of every bitterness. The woman who takes a lover is not so much attached to this lover as she is to love, and she continues to be still attached to love when the chosen lover has deceived her, until disillusion after disillusion brings her to love pleasure without love, and sometimes pleasure of the most degrading nature. Theresa de Sauve could never descend so far as this, because a sentiment of the ideal persisted within her, too feeble to counterbalance the fever of the senses, but strong enough to illumine in her own eyes the abyss of her weaknesses. This taciturn woman, through whom there passed at times the tremors of almost brutal desire, was no epicurean, no light and cheerful courtesan of the world. Conceived amid her mother's remorse, Theresa had a tragic soul. She was capable of depravity, but incapable of that amused forgetfulness which plucks the fleeting hour, and cannot, without effort, recall the first lover's name among all the rest. No; this first lover, this Frederick Suzel, whom George Liauran had justly suspected, could never be thought of by her without causing her thorough nausea by the recollection of the sad motives of her surrender to him. He was a man gay even to buffoonery, and witty even to cynicism, with that sort of wit which is current between the Opera House, Tortoni, and the Café Anglais.