When paying his addresses to Theresa, he had the good sense not to lose himself in the tricks of fashionable flirtations as did his numerous rivals--a troop of beasts of prey on the scent of a victim. With great skilfulness of language and a certain penetration of vice, he had frankly offered to arrange with her a kind of partnership for pleasure which should be secret, sure, and with no future, and the unfortunate woman had accepted his proposal. Why? Because she was dreadfully dull; because she was carrying off Suzel from one of her friends; because she was greedy for new sensations, and this person, with his dishonouring talk, had about him a sort of strange prestige of libertinism. Of this connection, in which Frederick had at least been faithful to his promise in not seeking to prolong it, Theresa had soon been deeply ashamed, and she had escaped from it as from the galleys. After a year spent in enduring her remorse, and in feeling herself sullied by all the knowledge of evil that her intimacy with this man had revealed to her, she had thought to find satisfaction for the needs of her heart in the person of Alfred Fanières, one of the most subtle novelists of the day. Did not all the books of this charming narrator, from his first and only volume of poetry to his last collection of tales, reveal the most minute and tender understanding of the gentle feminine mind? In this second connection, begun with the most intoxicating hope--that, namely, of consoling all the deceptions of an admired artist--Theresa had soon struck upon the implacable barrenness of the inmost nature of the worn-out literary man, in whom there is an absolute divorce between feeling and written expression. Though undeceived, she nevertheless persisted in remaining this man's mistress, from that reason which causes a woman's second love affair to be the longest of all in coming to a conclusion. She will admit that the first has been a mistake; but the mistake of her marriage and the mistake of her first amour make two; at the third error she acknowledges that the fault in her conduct is due to herself, and not to the circumstances of her life, and this is a cruel confession for secret pride. Then the writer's egotism had manifested itself so harshly, when he had believed himself sure of her, that the revolt had been too strong, and Theresa had broken with him.