'It's lucky there was no one to hear his "joke,"' thought Suzanne when she was alone. 'He has a silly way of saying these things, too, when he's out.' René's letter had, however, put her in such a good temper that she forgot to get angry, as she would do when she thought her husband too utterly simple. Such is the logic of these pretty and light-hearted sinners; they will exercise all their wits in blindfolding a man, and then blame him for stumbling. The fact of having deceived him does not satisfy them--he must only be deceived up to a certain point. If he goes beyond that it is too much--he makes them feel uneasy, and they hate him for it--sincerely. Suzanne contented herself with a shrug of her shoulders and a look of sweet pity. Then she took the letter from its hiding-place and read it for the third time. 'It's quite true,' she said aloud; 'he is not like other men.' Thereupon she fell into a deep reverie, in which she saw the poet as she had seen him waiting for her at the Louvre, standing just under the large Veronese canvas with his face turned a little to the right. How agitated he had been when his eyes met hers! How young he was! How his lips had trembled when he told her a little later that he loved her--those full, fresh lips which she could have bitten like some fruit, after having caressed his fair cheeks and the soft silken beard that adorned his manly face. But the fruit was not yet ripe; she must learn to wait. She sighed. Her calculation that the poet would write that very letter, and so soon after their meeting, too, had proved correct. She had made up her mind not to reply to it, nor yet to the second. For this second letter she waited one, two, three days. Though her confidence in the strength of the passion with which she had inspired René was unshaken, she was somewhat startled when, on the afternoon of the third day, just as her brougham was turning the corner of the Rue Murillo, she saw him standing where she had seen him once before. She was very careful to look as though she had not noticed him, and put on her saddest expression, her most dreamy eyes and an air of sweet resignation that would have moved a tiger. The comfortable brougham, furnished with a number of dainty and useful knick-knacks, was immediately transformed in René's eyes into a prison van containing a martyr--a martyr to her husband, a martyr to her home, a martyr to her love, and a martyr to her virtue.