This appetite for destruction which works in all creatures simultaneously with the sense of love, recoiled upon herself. She set herself to attack her own inner nature systematically, as some men intoxicate themselves, in analogous circumstances, glass by glass, in spite of disgust and, so to speak, from a sense of duty. She began to exhibit strange phenomena of nervous gaiety in the ordinary affairs of life. She, who hitherto had detested light conversation, affected to fill her talk with the most direct allusions to the things of love. She sent for those works which, during the last few years, she had heard spoken of as being the most audacious, in order to have them upon her table. She was seized with a sort of frenzy for pleasure, and every evening there would be a party at the theatre to which she brought Alfred, and she would speak of her intentions of going again into society, and interest herself with surprising activity in the disguise that she was to wear at a fancy ball given by the Malhoures, a ball for which Armand was to have chosen her costume. Her voice seemed to be of a higher pitch. She laughed a more sonorous laugh, and at all the demonstrations of this painful merriment Alfred, in spite of himself, felt affected by an indefinable anxiety, so completely were her eyes characterised by that extraordinary brightness, her gestures by those nervous jerkings, and her words by that abruptness which occasion a dread lest a woman capable of looking, gesticulating, and talking in this way should suddenly be seized by a fit of insanity, and should commit some extravagant and irretrievable action. She was stranger still on the morning of the day on which she was to go to the Malhoures' ball. It was the first time since her quarrel with Armand that she was going out for the evening. She did not come down to breakfast. Alfred, seated at the square table with his wife's cover laid opposite to him, and with his son on his right, ate without speaking, a prey to the increasing distress inflicted upon him by the mournful oddness of Helen's behaviour. She no longer seemed to be aware of the little boy's existence. "Good morning, dear," "Good night, dear," and that was nearly all. She, a mother usually so loving, seemed to have the maternal instinct paralysed within her, and for the moment such was indeed the case. A settled idea produces upon the heart the same effect as is produced by a bright and motionless point upon our eyes; it hypnotises the being which it sways, and limits its susceptibility to a tiny circle of sensations. It was impossible for the unhappy woman to have any feeling whatever in respect of her son, because in her condition of lucid aberration it was impossible for her to be sensible of his existence.