I agreed without interest, from courtesy, instead of giving way to my emotions as I had been invited to do. For a second short space of time, I surprised her in the act of trembling. Still, I continued to believe in her apathy, her reputation for it was so well established. When one holds to the judgment of the world one can not appreciate his own fireside. * * * These discords, these difficulties that come between two people when one aspires only to success and the attractions of fashionable life, while the other keeps intact her native and religious sensibility, do not necessarily prevent that kind of understanding which is possible in our flexible modern life to people of fortune. So many husbands and wives, for instance, if they should stop to think, would be surprised by the amount of their incompatibilities. They are content with approximate congeniality, in willing ignorance. But one cannot lay bare the roots of a tree and have it grow and live. The denial of its proper nourishment does not kill it at once: for a short time it may continue to blossom and to flower. At last, however, it falls before some severe storm, like a disabled ship which breasts the gale as long as possible and in the end surrenders to the elements. So I laid bare the roots of our love; little by little, I deprived it of its necessary protection, and finally crushed it utterly by one severe blow. These apparently trifling details, which I have enumerated, before coming exactly to the real outbreak, by degrees alienated Raymonde from me. It was indeed a gradual uprooting. So completely given up to this imperious desire to shine that I was intolerant of any encroachments upon it by the intimacies of our life together, entirely subordinated to that state of mind in which one seeks applause, I turned more and more from Raymonde and her influence, which I thought narrow and old-fashioned. She went with me uncomplainingly, wherever I suggested. I imposed on her immodest spectacles and degrading associates, such as our society supports, when she did not desire them: still she was not what I wanted to make her, a woman of the world. It was not in her. A stirring conflict was waged within her, between her love for me and her upright nature, incapable of bending itself to the manners of our day. I helped to create the problem, but did not attempt to aid her in its solution. Her struggle even began to undermine her health, though she showed no outward trace of the exhaustion she felt, excepting perhaps a loss of weight. But thinness was very fashionable at this time! Ah! those people whose daily acts are regulated by a definite code of morals, to whom faith and love are as necessary as food and respiration--they have a presentiment of death when once that faith is shaken; they have no powers of resistance when their ideals are finally shattered.