As I approached her, I thought of the mortal peril she had been in the other week. There seemed to me no more trace of it in her pale azure eyes than there was of jealousy upon Bonnivet’s beaming face. For the first, and, without doubt, the last time in my life, I was supplied with positive information about a fashionable intrigue. Usually one does not know the history of these fine gentlemen and beautiful ladies except from a vague “they say.” A woman is suspected of having so and so for a lover, and a man is suspected of having so and so as his mistress. This suspicion, which to people of their class is equivalent to certainty, is not reduced to exactness. The street and number of the house where they meet is not known. It is not known under what circumstances they start for the rendezvous. A door remains open to doubt, and if not open it is ajar. As I bowed to Madam de Bonnivet and received her greeting in the form of an amiable commonplace, I could see this haughty head on the pillow in the chamber of adultery, and the terror of her disturbed features when the continuous ringing of the bell and the repeated knocking at the door had warned her of her danger. The contrast was so sharp that for the first time I understood the unhealthy attraction which this to some extent double existence exercises over certain imaginations, and why women or men who have tasted these sensations no longer find any relish in others. Such profound and perilous deception procures something like an evil intoxication, the pleasure of a really superior and almost demoniac hypocrisy, to the man or woman who lie in that fashion. To this kind of infernal falsehood belonged the phrase which Madam de Bonnivet used to close our rapid and uninteresting conversation. “There is some one who would not forgive me for detaining you any longer,” she said, and the point of her fan indicated a direction which my glance followed. I saw Camille Favier, whom at that moment Jacques was approaching. “Go and speak to her,” she continued, “and tell your friend Molan that I have a little commission for him while I think of it.”