And then the renewal of friendship after the rupture had been, so far as Laurent was concerned, a genuine renewal of passion; whereas, to Thérèse, it had been a new phase of devotion, more refined and more touching than love itself. She had suffered from Palmer's desertion, but not in a cowardly way. She still had strength to meet injustice; indeed, we may say that was her whole strength. She was not one of those women who are everlastingly suffering and complaining, overflowing with useless regrets and insatiable longings. A violent reaction was taking place in her, and her intelligence, which was abundantly developed, naturally helped it on. She conceived an exalted idea of moral liberty, and when another's love and faith failed her, she had the righteous pride not to dispute the tattered compact, shred by shred. She even took pleasure in the idea of restoring freedom and repose, generously and without reproach, to whoever reclaimed them. But she had become much weaker than in her earlier womanhood, in the sense that she had recovered the craving to love and to have faith, which had been long benumbed by a disaster of exceptional severity. She had fancied for a long time that she could live thus, and that art would be her only passion. She had made a mistake, and she could no longer indulge in any illusions concerning the future. It was necessary for her to love, and her greatest misfortune was that it was necessary for her to love gently and self-sacrificingly, and to satisfy at any price the maternal impulse which was, as it were, a fatal element of her nature and her life. She had become accustomed to suffering for some one, she longed to suffer still, and if that longing, strange, it is true, but well characterized in certain women, and in certain men as well, had made her less merciful to Palmer than to Laurent, it was because Palmer had seemed to her too strong himself to need her devotion. So that Palmer had erred in offering her support and consolation. Thérèse had missed the feeling that she was necessary to that man, who wished her to think of no one but herself. Laurent, who was more ingenuous, had that peculiar charm of which she was fatally enamored--weakness! He made no secret of it, he proclaimed that touching infirmity of his genius with transports of sincerity and inexhaustible emotion. Alas! he, too, erred. He was not really weak, any more than Palmer was really strong. He had his hours, he always talked like a child of heaven, and as soon as his weakness had won the day, he recovered his strength to make others suffer, as is the wont of all the children whom we adore.