"We will go in now," she said; "give me your arm." "Oh, madame, how courageous you are!" said Mme. Mauperin, advancing to meet Mme. Bourjot when she entered the room. "It is not wise of you, though, at all. I will have your carriage ordered." "No, please don't, thank you," replied Mme. Bourjot quickly. "I think I promised you that I would sing; I am quite ready now," and she went across to the piano, gracious and valiant once more, with that heroic smile beneath which society actors conceal from the public the tears they are weeping within themselves, and the wounds which discharge themselves into their hearts. XX Mme. Bourjot had married in order that two important business houses should be united; for the sake of amalgamating various interests she had been wedded to a man whom she did not know, and at the end of a week of married life she had felt all the contempt that a wife can possibly feel for a husband. It was not that she had expected anything very ideal, nor that she had looked on marriage as a romantic and imaginative girl so often does. She was remarkably intelligent herself, and seriously inclined, her mind had been formed and nurtured by reading, study, and acquirements which were almost more suitable for a man. All that she asked from the companion of her life was that he should be intellectual and intelligent, a being in whom she could place all her ambitions and her pride as a married woman, a man with a brilliant future before him, capable of winning for himself one of those immense fortunes to which money nowadays leads, and who should prove himself able to leap over the gaps of modern society to a high place in the Ministry, the Public Works, or the Exchequer. All her castles in the air crumbled away with this husband, whom she found day by day more and more hopelessly shallow, more and more incapable, devoid of all that should have been in him, and which was in her instead, more narrow-minded, more mean and petty as time went on, and all this mingled with and contradicted by all the violences and weaknesses of a childish disposition.