This woman, pretty and refined, but unfeeling, very solicitous about propriety in consequence of the lengthened sojournings at Paris with her father, who had been an official deputy under the July monarchy, was withal minutely devout, and instinctively unkind, like all persons who are accustomed never to admit the just sensibilities of others. When Alfred Chazel had come to be intimate with Monsieur de Vaivre, owing to their common taste for excavations and antiquities, she had with joy perceived that he was falling in love with Helen. It afforded her a secret pleasure to marry her step-daughter to a man who had no fortune, and, the dowry being very small, to condemn her for years to a middling existence. Death, which takes as little account of our evil calculations as of our great intentions, had taken in hand to render abortive this woman's hateful anticipation, through which poor Helen had seen no more clearly than Monsieur de Vaivre himself. All that the young girl understood on the day that Chazel asked her in marriage was that she would be free from her step-mother's tyranny. She had a plain perception of that from which she was escaping. As to marriage and its physical realities, what could she have known of them? Thus, on leaving the church, she found herself in a moral situation that was full of peril. Her childhood, spent, as it had been, beneath continual oppression, had to an excessive degree developed within her a taste for the romantic--a power, that is, of fashioning beforehand an image of life with which the reality is subsequently compared. Through her joy at deliverance, her future marriage showed to her like a paradise of delight. Misfortune had it that Alfred Chazel should be one of those men who, with all kindness, all delicacy even, at the bottom of their hearts, are for ever ignorant of a woman's nature. The consummation of the marriage was to Helen something as hateful as it had been unexpected--like a tribute paid to clumsy brutality. The result was that she received her husband's endearments with a repugnance that was imperfectly dissembled, and that added to the timidity of a man already timid by nature and awkwardly impassioned, as those who have not slackened the initial ardour of their youth in facile intrigues often are. Alfred was secretly afraid of showing his tenderness to his wife, and he concealed from her the intensity of a love that would perhaps have touched her had she been able to perceive it.