For Madame Moraines, who had just attained her thirtieth year, and who, satiated as she was with every kind of luxury, with no ambition to realise, and without the least respect for the men she met in her set, the apparition of a new being like René, so entirely different to the usual drawing-room 'swell,' might and did become an event in its way. It was curiosity that led her to take a seat next to him at Madame Komof's supper-table, and her feminine tact had at once told her in what _rôle_ she would be most seductive in his eyes. His conversation had delighted her, but on her return home she had gone to sleep after uttering the 'Impossible!' which is used as a charm against all complaints of this kind by Society belles, a class more bound down in their narrow paths of pleasure than any busy housewife by her daily duties. Then René had called, and the impression he had already made on her was intensified a hundred-fold. She was pleased with all she saw or imagined in the young man--his good looks, his true-heartedness, his awkwardness, and his timidity. It was in vain that she kept repeating 'Impossible!' as she put the finishing touch to her dress by fastening one or two diamond pins in her bodice--in spite of that word she was already capitulating. She turned the idea over again and again, and all kinds of plans for bringing the adventure to a successful issue passed through her practical mind. 'Desforges is very sharp,' she reflected, adding, as she remembered the Baron's tirade against literary men, 'and he has already smelt a rat.' This tirade had at first afforded her amusement, but now it annoyed her, and made her feel a desire to act in a manner entirely opposed to her excellent friend's wishes. She was so completely absorbed in thought that it attracted her maid's attention, and caused that young person to say to the footman, 'There's something wrong with Madame. Can Monsieur have found out anything?' This unreasonable and irresistible abstraction lasted all through dinner, then on the way to the theatre, and even during the performance, until Madame Ethorel suddenly remarked, 'Isn't that Monsieur Vincy looking at us over there--in the stalls near the door on the right?' 'Madame Komof's poet?' asked Suzanne indifferently. During René's visit she had mentioned that she was going to the Opera that night. She remembered it now as she put up her own glasses, mounted in chased silver--another present from the Baron. She saw René, and as he timidly turned away his glance a sudden thrill ran through her. Had Desforges, from his place at the back of the box, overheard Madame Ethorel's remark? No, she thought not; he was in deep conversation with Crucé. 'He is talking shop,' she said to herself as she listened, 'and has heard nothing. What is going on in me?'