"Come, come! you are still distant and haughty with me. And yet I am your friend; I have proved it. I broke a lance for you not long ago. Some cowardly wretch of the Marquise d'Estrelle's set ventured to cast a slur on you because of a little painter; you know, the son of the famous Thierry, who lived at the end of your garden, by the way. I imposed silence on him; I said that a woman like you did not dishonor herself by being of a sociable disposition; and then, all of a sudden, I was seconded by Abbé de Nivières, who said: 'That young man doesn't even know her; he has gone to Sèvres to live with his mother. He is an excellent young man; he says that he never saw Madame d'Estrelle in all the time that he lived near her, and it is the truth.'--By the way, you are interested in those people, aren't you, the mother especially? Do you ever see her now?" "She no longer needs me, I have no reason to see her." "Then I see that everything is all right, except your health, which disturbs me. Will you come to Chantilly with me? I am going to pass a month there; we shall see plenty of society, and perhaps it will set you up; then, if you recover your lovely coloring, perhaps we shall find a husband for you." Madame d'Ancourt departed at last, chattering volubly, offering her services, and sympathizing with her friend to the very step of her carriage, abusing egotists, and in reality caring for nothing on earth but herself. "She is too proud and too suspicious, that Julie," she said to herself. "Faith, I'll not go to see her again very soon! She is distressing. If she needs me, she will know where to find me." It was almost the same story with all Madame d'Estrelle's acquaintances. She had never understood so well the abandonment which befalls all those who abandon themselves, and she abandoned herself the more completely in that she felt that her heart was becoming withered. When she had passed several days without apparently giving any thought to the subject of her future action, she roused herself one morning to say to Marcel: "I have done what you wished me to do; I have shown myself and explained my absence; I have said that I am to go away before long. It is time to have done with it and to turn over the house to Monsieur Antoine. It is my purpose to go to live in the provinces, in some lonely place where I shall be entirely forgotten. I shall take nobody but Camille. Do me the favor to advise me in the selection of an out-of-the-way place and a very modest dwelling." "There is one great difficulty," said Marcel, "and that is that Monsieur Antoine will not assent to any settlement, that his receipt in full is in my wallet, and that he has not yet any idea that it has not been accepted."