“Oh, no, indeed. Your work is your glory. I shall be afraid, but I shall pray. A woman can fear--” However, I soon abandoned my studies because they seemed too problematical, and would not have been productive of immediate visible prestige. I was not to take them up again until much later. * * * One makes mistakes: I was mistaken in my belief of Raymonde’s lowly origin. I prided myself that I had raised her to my rank, by magnificent generosity, without seeking to divine how such tact and moral culture as hers had come about without the slow formation of time. The chance discovery of some legal document one day informed me of the great age and secular distinction of her family, which reverses had forced to take up service in almost the same place where it had once enjoyed its fortune. This discovery seemed a blow at my superiority. Pride kept me from mentioning it. * * * One evening we came home and found that her maid was not there for us. I made the occasion an excuse for reprimands. “You do not know how to give your orders,” I said. “I did not want her to wait up for me.” “That is a mistake,” I said. “I can wait on myself.” She did not think it right that she should oblige a servant to wait up for her pleasure. She preferred to arrange her beautiful hair for the night herself. * * * I had noticed the time she spent each day in going over her accounts. It seemed that she always had too much money at her disposal. I was not accustomed to such saving. I attributed to a narrow education that admirable sense of economy which is one of the superiorities of the French woman, expert in thrift and housekeeping, knowing how to be unostentatiously charitable as well, notwithstanding the cosmopolitan crowd encamped among us with its dissipations and luxuries. “Leave that,” I assured her, “you do not know how to spend money.” “I need nothing now.” “But that is the point, you should want all sorts of things.” “Why should I?” “Why not, since we can afford them.” She made me share her charities with her, which were numerous, but she resisted all entreaties to personal luxuries, with a gentleness and disinterestedness which offended me. I unceasingly suggested changes of toilette, and was irritated by the resistance which I encountered, unexpected in any woman, much less in the wife of the millionaire Cernay. “Do you find no pleasure in being more fashionable than the others, better dressed and more noticed?” “None, I assure you.” “I want every one to mark your appearance as soon as you enter a salon. I want all the men to admire you and all the women to envy you. That is an artistic pleasure. But you are insensible to everything. You like nothing.” “Oh, but I do like so many things.” “What, for instance?” “I need not tell you.”