With repulsion (and not without attraction, too) Annette witnessed the passage of those love affairs of which she had known nothing. They formed a motley and fantastic troop. In love as in art, Raoul's caprice was "period color." Annette recognized certain names belonging to her own world; and with hostility she recalled the smiles and caresses that she used to receive from certain favorites. Others belonged upon a less lofty social level; their spelling was no less free than the sentiments they expressed. Annette's disdainful pout was accentuated; but her mind, with sharp and mocking eyes like her father's, saw the comic aspect of these women who, leaning forward, with a wisp of hair in their eyes and the tip of their tongues thrust out, made their pens gallop over the paper. All these adventures, some a little longer, some a little shorter, but none very long after all, passed, succeeded one another, and effaced one another. Annette was grateful for that,--wounded, but disdainful. She was not yet at the end of her discoveries. In another drawer, sedulously put apart (more carefully, she was forced to remark, than her mother's letters) a new bundle revealed a more enduring liaison. Although the dates were carelessly indicated, it was easy to see that this correspondence embraced a long period of years. It was in two handwritings: the one, incorrect, slovenly, and backhand, stopped half way through the packet; the other, childish at first, gradually grew firmer, and continued until the last years, even (and this discovery was particularly painful to Annette), up until the last months of her father's life. And this correspondent, who was robbing her of a part of that sacred period of which she had thought herself the unique possessor, this double intruder, was addressing her father as "Father!" She experienced the sensation of an intolerable wound. With an angry gesture she flung her father's dressing-gown from her shoulders. The letters fell from her hands, and she sank back in her chair with dry eyes and burning cheeks. She did not analyse her own emotions. She was too moved by passion to know what she thought. But, with all her passion, she was thinking: "He deceived me! . . ." Again she picked up the hateful letters, and this time she did not let them go until she had absorbed them down to the very last line. She read, breathing deeply with her mouth shut, burned by a hidden fire of jealousy, and by another sentiment, still obscure, that had been awakened. Not for a second did the idea occur to her, in penetrating the intimacy of this correspondence, in possessing herself of her father's secrets, that she might be guilty of a moral misdemeanor. Not for a second did she doubt her right. . . . (Her right! The spirit of reason was far away; another power, a despotic one, was speaking!) . . . On the contrary, she felt that it was she who was wounded in her right--_in her right_--by her father!