The first section of _Claudine en Ménage_ analyzes with skill her as yet incomplete marital adjustment. She resents the memory of her elaborate wedding and her husband’s continuing mixture of fatherly indulgence and experienced sensuality which shames her adoring naïveté. The couple have spent a year in continental travel uncongenial to the Montigny tomboy, and as she settles in Renaud’s Paris apartment she is homesick for her native province and rebellious against the routine of sophisticated entertaining her husband wishes to resume. Accepting life on his terms with what grace she can, she presently meets Rezi, a seductive Austrian, wife of a retired English officer, and soon they are mutually infatuated. Their emotion can find no outlet because the colonel’s jealous surveillance and the unremitting social activity in her own household afford them no privacy. After a period of increasingly painful frustration Claudine appeals to her husband for aid. Renaud has all along shown the same excited interest in this affair that his son exhibited in her relations with Luce, and he readily agrees to find the pair a private haven. He insists, however, on retaining the key to their “nest” himself and on escorting them to it whenever they wish to go there. This complaisance bordering on voyeurism offends Claudine, who is at heart wounded by his lack of jealousy. Gradually she realizes that what she feels for Rezi is mere infatuation. She suspects that her partner has been intimate with other women about whom she is evasive, and she even finds reason to wonder whether before her marriage Renaud and Rezi might not have had an affair. Her brooding discontent increases during three weeks of illness when she can keep watch on neither husband nor friend, and comes to a head on the day when she pays a surprise visit to the “nest” and finds the two there together. In a fury of jealousy and disillusionment she goes home to Montigny. There, healed by springtime in the country, she owns that she is still as much in love with Renaud as his letters show him to be with her. She finally writes him that he has been too indulgent, too like a doting father. ‘I wanted Rezi and you gave her to me like a bonbon. You should have explained that there are sweets one cannot eat without becoming ill.’[2] She tells him that if they are to be happy she must be more his equal as he must be more her master. Life seems to her so much more sane and wholesome in the country that she is determined to stay there, and she hopes he will consent to make his permanent home there as well. When business or even pleasure call him to Paris, she will let him go, knowing that when he returns it will be from genuine inclination. The volume closes with this ultimatum without disclosing Renaud’s response.