Yes, the aunt knew: it was always her ill-luck to go into Thérèse’s room just at the moment when she wanted to be alone. Indeed, in the past, the old lady had often felt she was not wanted immediately she had opened the door. She got up with an effort and, leaning on Bernard’s arm, went up to her room, which was over the large drawing-room. Bernard went in after her, carefully lit a candle on the table, kissed her on the forehead, and then withdrew. The aunt never took her eyes off him. What did she read on the faces of men whose voices she could not hear? She left Bernard the time to get to his room, and opened her door again gently ... but he was still on the landing, leaning against the banisters, rolling a cigarette; she hurriedly went in again, her legs trembling and so breathless that she had not the strength to undress. She remained lying on her bed, with staring eyes. CHAPTER X In the drawing-room, Thérèse was sitting in the dark. There were still some embers alive under the ashes of the fire. She did not move. Now that it was too late, stray passages from the confession she had prepared during her journey, floated to the surface of her mind; but she could not find fault with herself for not having used it. As a matter of fact, the story was too well constructed, and had but little reference to reality. The importance she had chosen to attach to young Azévédo’s conversation was mere foolishness. As if that could have had the slightest effect! No, she had obeyed some inner inexorable law: she had failed to destroy this family, so she herself would be destroyed; they were right to consider her a monster, but she thought them monstrous, too. Without appearing to do so they now intended gradually and methodically to crush her out of existence. Henceforth, this powerful family machine would be used against her,--because she had not understood how to dislocate the mechanism, nor get out of reach of its ruthless wheels. It was useless to look for any reason other than the fact that they were what they were, and she was herself. “All those efforts,” she thought, “to wear a mask and a disguise, and impersonate a wife, which I could only keep up for less than two years, I imagine other women, no different from me, carry on until they die, saved, perhaps, by use and wont, drugged by habit, and stupefied into slumber against the maternal and all-powerful bosom of the Family. But I ... I ... I....”