For all this, and by a seeming inconsistency such as characterises the facile kindliness of the indifferent when anxious to save themselves useless shocks, Armand had lent himself to the requisitions of Helen's passion. To evade petty contradictions, he had laid aside many of his habits. He declined dinner after dinner, deferred visit after visit, distanced his appearances at the club, in the Rue Royale, where formerly he used to show himself nearly every day. "You are never to be seen now." "I thought you were abroad." "You rascal, what good fortune are you hiding from us?" Such were the phrases with which he was greeted by nearly every one he met at the corner of a footpath, on the threshold of a restaurant, in the lobby of a theatre. These phrases had at first made him smile. They now caused him a vague regret for his former mode of life. In proportion as habituation deadened his pleasure in the possession of Helen, did he surprise himself remembering with longing the insipid diversions of his freedom, which, as soon as they were renewed, he was again to look upon as hateful drudgery. All these different shades of feeling were beginning to have the effect of rendering his connection with Helen burdensome to him, and that long before the scene, the cruel recollection of which was persecuting him now. But the scene once passed through, how could he maintain his actual relations with his mistress? No, a thousand times no. He could not do it. And first with respect to himself. "Upon my word," he said to himself, "I will despise myself up to a certain point, but not beyond. So long as he had not spoken to me--" He paused upon this thought, then went on aloud with an evil laugh: "Ha! ha! so long as he had not spoken to me, it was exactly the same thing. Yes, but I did not feel it as I do now. I have had enough of all this lying. Pah! Pah!" and there was a physical bitterness in his mouth, almost a real nausea at the thought of deceiving Alfred again, after the step that the other had taken so loyally and so affectionately. "And then," he reflected, "I cannot do it on her account. When jealousy has been roused, it is never completely lulled again. Alfred would understand it all in the end. He would follow his wife or have her followed. Then, behold a surprise, a scandal, and the unhappy Helen loses at a blow her position, her child, a part, doubtless, of her fortune, and all to be constrained to live with me who do not love her, and whom she does not love." In order to give force to the plan of a final rupture which was already being sketched in his brain, he took pleasure in considering this last thought. No, Helen did not love him. She thought that she loved him, as she had probably thought she loved Varades and the rest; for there must have been others, in conformity with the axiom that a man is never a woman's first or second lover.