While the husband, fatigued, weary, left his office heavy-headed, after having eaten a hasty meal, put on his dress coat and white tie in haste, got into his carriage in haste, hurriedly accompanied his wife, left her in order to take a doze on an armchair during the height of the ball, woke in haste, returned home in haste, slept hurriedly, rose the same, dragging this indefatigable creature about with him like a convict's chain, she smiled at others, enticed others, waltzed with others, adorned herself for others, keeping for him only her weariness, her yawns, her pallor and her sick-headaches. For these two galley-slaves of _chic_, the winter passed in this manner, as fatiguing as months of penal servitude, and they went none too soon, when the summer arrived, to breathe the sea air or enjoy the sunshine of the country, in order to restore their frames, wan, worn-out, seedy and "gruelled," as Sabine Marsy said, when she recalled her connection with the artists. "Ah! how much better I like my home!" thought Madame Vaudrey. Sabine and Madame Gerson, with the wives of the ministers, those of the chiefs of departments, and the regular visitors, were the most assiduous in their attentions to Adrienne, whom they considered decidedly provincial. She, stupefied, was alarmed by these Parisian bustlers, that resembled machines in running order, jabbering away as music-boxes play. "Do they tire you?" said Guy de Lissac to her bluntly one evening, succumbing to a feeling of pity for this pensive young woman,--who was a hundred times prettier than Madame Gerson, whose beauty was so highly extolled in the journals,--this minister's wife, who voluntarily kept herself in the background with a timidity that betrayed no awkwardness, but was in every way attractive, especially to a man about town like Guy. "They do not tire me, they upset me," Adrienne replied. "Ah! they are in full _go_, as it is called. An express train. But they amuse themselves so much that they have not even time to smile. When the locomotive spins along too rapidly, try to distinguish the scenery!" Adrienne instinctively felt that under his irony this sceptic disguised a sort of sincerity. Lissac's wit pleased her. He surprised her somewhat at times, but the probably assumed raillery of the young man compensated for the insipid nonsense of the conversation to which she listened daily. At first from mere curiosity and after from a sentiment of respectful devotion, Guy was impelled to study that delicate and sensitive nature, entirely swayed by love of Sulpice, that suffered at times a vague pressure as of some indefinable anguish at the throat, as if a vacuum--a choking vacuum--had been created about her by some air-pump.