There was no time to lose, and yet they began by exchanging commonplaces, which generally precede every argument: preliminaries which seem as indispensable as skirmishes before a battle. She quietly told him of her own and her children's health, announced her coming departure for Uriage, where she would spend the summer to avoid the heat of Grenoble. He stared at her somewhat rudely and with evident surprise. She was wearing the same appropriate dress of dark purple that he had heard praised at Mme. Passerat's, of the beauty of which he could now get a better idea. But it was the puzzle of her charming face that he was ardently studying: it revealed no traces of life nor of the sorrow of the past few months. As long as he could remember, he had always seen it as it was now, with high color, pure and glossy as a flower, without a shadow or a line. Even the contrast of her fair hair and her black eyes did not impress him as being unusual, and her mysterious charm for him was the result of expectation, not of the past. Realizing that she was under observation, she blushed slightly. The blood mounted easily to her cheeks. He explained: "Your extreme youthfulness surprises me every time I meet you. They surely must call you 'Mademoiselle' in the shops!" This compliment amused her: "It is true;" she said, "yet I have been married eight years and my children are growing up." Philippe Lagier did not add that at every meeting she gave him an almost irritating impression, a complex of vexation, of persistent sympathy, of disdain and of a desire to provoke her: then all these contradictory feelings changed to an indulgence, a gallant instinct of protection which he felt for his friend's pretty wife. After these banal remarks, in accordance with his usual way, he began brusquely: "You have made up your mind?" "To what?" she asked, although she had understood. "To a separation from Albert." She seemed to be thunderstruck. "Oh! why not after all that has happened!" The lawyer at once expressed his point of view: "A man like him is not to be judged by one action, but by his entire life." She noticed that he did not speak of pardon, but of justice, and she mechanically repeated in her surprise. "His whole life?" "Most assuredly. I knew him before you did. Did you ever know in what straitened circumstances your mother-in-law was left after the death of her husband? Did Albert ever tell you of her devotion, of the privations which that splendid woman went through to bring him up, and of his industrious youth, so full of effort and so productive at an age when the rest of us are wasting our days? Why did not you go to seek the advice of Mme. Derize?" He became more animated than if he were at the bar. It was an indication that he was not unconcerned about her. And if he were interested in her, why this awkward intervention? Our feelings have a singular manner of expression. She lowered her tone of voice and said quite naturally: