Her neck, mobile and graceful, issued from the furs which hid her disguise as a flower-girl of the time of Louis XV. She wore pink silk stockings, pink satin shoes, a flowered skirt, and in her soul was the mortal blending of frenzy and despair of a woman who would ruin herself with delight, for nothing--for the sake of being ruined and ruined for ever! Through the brougham windows, the glass of which she had let down in order to inhale something of the keen night air, she watched the houses filing past, and the picture presented by Paris after the toils of the day. The shops were flaming on the ground floor; the cafés were opening their doors to customers; the wind was sending a quiver through the gas flames that outlined the notices of the theatres. Along the Boulevards, as in the Avenue de l'Opéra and in the Rue des Tuileries, there was a moving crowd. Of what was this crowd in quest? Of pleasure, and of nothing but pleasure. _She_ had pursued an ideal which had proved most false! It was time to live like the rest. A woman's amusement consists of coquetry, of intrigue. She would be a coquette. She would have lovers--yes, lovers. She repeated these words, in thought, with strange passion, for the face of the man she had loved had just appeared again before her recollection, and with it the unbearable palpitation of the heart had begun again. Ah! between that face and herself, between that memory and her heart, she would put other faces, other memories! Yet, how he had mocked her! She now at certain moments felt a genuine hatred towards him. By a sort of backward crystallisation, she multiplied reasons for animosity round the thought of Armand that she bore in her mind, and she calumniated him fiercely on her own behalf. Did not his whole behaviour towards her bear the stamp of abominable and daily calculation? When he had entreated her to be his under the pretence that he would not believe in her love without this proof, was it not that he would not fail where another had succeeded? Was it true even that Alfred was jealous? This was doubtless a pretext devised for the purpose of bringing about a rupture. And how carefully he had kept the name of Varades to himself, to throw it into his mistress's teeth only at the last moment, without giving her time to justify herself! She ought to have spoken, to have looked for old letters, to have found some testimony. But why? Would he have believed her for an instant? And bruising herself afresh against the poisoned point of injustice, she detested all men in this man, she envied those who mock the hateful race, the jades who take the initiative in this duel of distrust and are the first to betray. How glad she would be to have been one of them, to have really had a dozen intrigues before that one with Armand, and to be able to tell him so, and to degrade herself and him, and to pollute everything within her and about her, her soul and her body, with a pollution such as no water could wash away.