She seemed to be looking for something at her feet. Then she rose, without haste, and, coldly bowing and bowed to, went out. No one who saw her in the street, walking along with her rhythmic step, her head high, her cool, correct, indifferent air, would have suspected the storm of contempt that was making her wounded heart leap. But, once in the Boulogne house, she shut herself up in her room with the child and pressed him to her with bitter tears. And she laughed defiantly. VI There were plenty of interesting houses in Paris where Annette would have been honorably received--especially in the society that should have been familiar to the daughter of Rivière the architect, among those artists who live on the fringe of social Philistia, who, though they are endowed with the traditional family spirit, have no prejudices and carry the bourgeois virtues even into free unions. But Annette had little acquaintance among the women of the artistic world. With a very orderly mind and reserved manners that were anything but Bohemian, she had little taste for their habits and conversation, though she had plenty of respect for their great qualities of courage, good nature and endurance. For it is certainly true that in ordinary life relations are founded much less on respect than on a community of instincts and habits. Besides, Raoul Rivière had long ago dropped his old companions. As soon as his success had permitted him to enter the sphere of wealth and official honors, this man of strong appetites had broken with the _haud aurea mediocritas_. He had been too intelligent not to appreciate the society of men who worked more than that of the Parisian drawing-rooms which he criticized among his intimates with cruel irony, but he had established himself in the latter because it gave him a wider pasturage. He had managed to escape secretly into other and very mixed circles, where he was able to satisfy his passion for pleasure and his need of unrestrained independence, for he led a double or triple life. But few were aware of this, and his daughter had had no knowledge of anything but his outward and business life.