This little conversation was also unimportant. But it was sufficient to establish that feeling of awkwardness that is often sufficient to destroy the joy felt in the most dearly desired meeting. Hautefeuille divined there was a little reproach in the remark made by his friend about his letters, and he felt again the sensation, of hostility in Madame du Prat's observation. He became silent. The carriage was ascending the network of roads that he had traversed with Corancez upon the morning of their visit to the Jenny, and the white silhouette of the Villa Helmholtz stood out upon the left beyond the silvery foliage of the olive trees. His mistress's image reappeared in the mind of the young man with the most vivid intensity. He could not help making a comparison between his dear beloved Ely and his wife's friend. The little Frenchwoman seated by his side, a little constrained and stiff in spite of her elegant correctness, suddenly appeared to him so poor, so characterless, such a nullity, so uninteresting beside the supple, voluptuous image of the foreigner. Berthe du Prat was the embodiment of the quiet and somewhat negative distinction that stamps the educated Parisienne (for the species exists). Her travelling costume was the work of a famous _costumier_, but she had been so careful to shun the merest approach to eccentricity that it was completely impersonal. She was certainly pretty with the fragile, delicate prettiness of a Dresden china figure. But her visage was so well under control, her lips so close pressed, her eyes so devoid of expression, that her charming physiognomy did not provoke the least desire to know what sort of a soul it hid. It was so apparent that it would only be made up of accepted ideas, of conventional sentiments, of perfectly irreproachable desires. This is the sort of woman that men who have seen much life ordinarily seek for wives. After having corrupted his imagination in too many cases of irregularity, Olivier had naturally married the child whose beauty flattered his pride and whose irreproachable conduct was a guarantee against any cause for jealousy. It was not less natural that Pierre, educated in the midst of conventional ideas, and who had suffered from the prejudices of his family, should remark in the composition of the young woman her very evident poverty of human sympathy, as well as all that was mean and mediocre, particularly by comparison.