As he multiplied his words he rang the bell again and, quite unable to stand the strain any longer, went to the door and half opened it. “Excuse me, excuse me,” he said. As he put his head into the corridor Madame Guibert raised her eyes and surprised him in this frightened and pitiful attitude. A crushed man is still more to be pitied than a fool. Madame Guibert felt ashamed for him and thought: “It will certainly be much better to wait for Madame Dulaurens. What I could say to him would matter very little.” A slight misgiving began to lessen her confidence. She mentally compared her poor companion with her own husband whom no circumstance could have deprived of his composure, his clear-sightedness, his firmness. “What a difference!” she reflected sorrowfully, for she was quite incapable of overbearing pride. She did not think of herself, who had made such splendid, fearless men and women of her sons and daughters. While M. Dulaurens was persistently enquiring after her health she was looking affectionately at a portrait of Alice as a child. “She has scarcely changed at all,” she said. “Dear little Alice, so pretty and gentle. How we shall love her! She is so frail and delicate, but she will grow stronger. We will surround her with love and care. We will make a hardy flower of this hothouse blossom. And perhaps she will keep _him_ near us better than I could. I am so old now, and every year these separations become more and more cruel.” She did not disguise from herself her womanly weakness. At last Madame Dulaurens burst in like a whirl-wind. She flew to her husband’s assistance. Fearing that by now he might have blundered and said, something stupid, she had come downstairs as quickly as she could. The severity of her rule did not suffice to reassure her, for she scarcely suspected the despotism of it. In many flattering words she excused herself to Madame Guibert for keeping her waiting. The latter, at the sight of her, had already lost almost all of her modest confidence. What could she expect of a favorable nature from this still beautiful and elegant woman, whose high-pitched voice, so patronising and hard, whose affected politeness scarcely hid the pride and dryness of her soul. At once she felt the difference in their points of view concerning the serious things of life. An abyss separated them, which only youth and love, in their madness, could think of bridging over. She had a secret conviction that all which weighed so heavily on her heart was going to be held as naught, and that all her devotion, her energy, and her toil, the true mark of aristocracy in the human race, would presently be matched against those worldly pretensions of which she thought nothing at Le Maupas and of which she discovered suddenly the disturbing reality. Feeling the weakness of her age and poverty, she implored God’s help.