Having once declared herself, she was no longer shy or afraid. She did not hesitate to tell the truth. Since he was voluntarily silent, had she not to remind him of her rights as a woman, and the obligations which children impose? She thought she had opened his heart, but he had brutally shut it again. With what reserve and modesty she justified her step, and how well the exigency of the case helped her with a proposition that she had not prepared in advance, and which her mind hit upon with the first words. "I have come because you are free now. Then, it seemed to me that we ought to be reconciled at least outwardly, for the sake of the future of Marie Louise and Philippe, and your future too. I am always your wife. I was a very poor one before. I understood that too late. But I have suffered much. I am not reproaching you with anything. Some day perhaps I shall forget, we shall forget.--I do not know.... Perhaps you might take your mother's flat in the Boulevard des Adieux for the summer. Saint Martin is not far from Grenoble. You could come up and see us sometimes in the daytime. Is it impossible?" What dignity she preserved in this humiliation which she so little deserved, and which must have cost her so much. Albert had not been entirely able to lose her from his memory except in the first months of his infidelity, and since he had seen her again in circumstances in which one's sensibility becomes more deeply impregnated with impressions, the refined and purified charm which he had found in her recurred to him too often in comparison with Anne. But a man's heart has so many complicated recesses: free, he puts from him furiously the solution he ardently wished when he was not free. The romantic pride of his liaison and the thought of submitting for the second time to lessons of love, the antipathy which is inevitably aroused in us by the clear understanding of a reality which imposes itself like a fatal and logical order of things, made him retire with himself, and separated him from all outside influence. "I am detained in Paris," he said after a short silence. From the beginning of the scene she had had an intuition of her failure, but nevertheless, she suffered keenly. "All the summer?" she implored to satisfy her conscience. "I fear so." He turned his head toward the children who were looking out at the neighboring chestnut blossoms, and he immediately digressed: they were, moreover, old recriminations, which he had often analyzed critically: "Why did you prevent my helping you to educate the children? I could do only that for them and you have deprived me of it." She replied gently: "I had taken charge of it. You had deserted me. Have they been badly looked after?"