All was reflected there--the soft-toned carpet, the bath of English porcelain, the wide marble washhand-stand with its silver fittings and its host of small toilet necessaries. Did the sight of all these things remind her of the divers conditions that secured her this happy existence? In any case, it was of her husband she was thinking when she exclaimed, 'The dear, good fellow!' The sparkling diamonds that she had kept in her ears recalled thoughts of Desforges, and following close upon the other came the mental exclamation, 'Dear, kind friend!' These two contradictory impressions became as easily reconciled in the head adorned with those long silken tresses as the two facts were reconciled in life. Women excel in these moral mosaics, which appear less monstrous when the process of their construction has been carefully watched. This fair Parisian of thirty was certainly as thoroughly corrupted as it is possible to be; but, to do her justice, it must be said at once that she was unaware of it, so passive had she been with regard to the circumstances that had gradually reduced her to this state of unconscious immorality. When Suzanne had allowed herself to be married to Paul Moraines two years before the war of 1870 she had felt neither repugnance nor enthusiasm. The matter had been arranged by the two families; old Moraines, a senator ever since the establishment of the Second Empire, belonged to the same set as old Bois-Dauffin, and Paul, who was then an officer of the Council of State, a good dancer and a charming ladies' man, seemed made for her, as she did for him. For the first two years they formed what is called in women's parlance 'a sweet couple;' it was one round of balls, suppers, and theatre parties, with rural festivities in summer and hunting parties in autumn, all of which both of them enjoyed to the full. Paul himself well defined the kind of relations that bound him to his wife amidst these continual pleasures. 'You are as bewitching as a mistress,' he would say to her as he kissed her in the brougham that took them home at one in the morning.