The first effect in Raymonde was a loss of cheerfulness. I did not notice it then, yet I recall it clearly now. There is in our past always something which we would forget, but which does not permit itself to be forgotten. There was a time when her laughter was spontaneous, with her little girl, in carelessness and innocence of heart. When she held her child upon her knee, and lavished her enticement on her, she resembled those madonnas which have altogether the air of elder sisters. Little by little this clear, charming laughter became less frequent, diminished, was shattered! Even Dilette perceived it. And I did not fail to notice that the poor little one missed, as she might her broken or lost toys, these tokens of joyousness. Raymonde enjoyed only the simple pleasures of life, of which I had none to offer her. Into the simplest of them I had injected, like a secret passion, this perverse desire for sensation, filling with astonishment, torment and pained shame, a heart simple and ingenuous, ignorant of the intricacy of our life. The expression which I had seen in her face on that first day in May, when I met her in the wood and when my unexpected presence made her retrace her road, or when I had made my avowal of love at the chateau, or on the evening of one of our last walks before the birth of our child, this look of fear,--here, I saw it again, like a ghost, upon her face. But I attached no importance to it. * * * She told me once later, that during all this time she was trying to conform to my tastes, she never paid one of those visits to which I attached such importance, without reciting a little prayer to God, on the staircase or in the ante-chamber, for courage. And it was the same thing when we received. It was absolute torture for her to endure the custom of kissing the hand which had recently come again into vogue. Her arms hung at her sides and one had always to search for her hand there. She never submitted without a shudder, which, though she did her best to suppress it, she never entirely succeeded in concealing--above all, at home, when she wore no gloves. * * * We had reached that point, she in her isolation and growing unhappiness, I in that state of nervous irritation where my baffled worldly ambitions and the substitution of my personal life for our common life had thrown me, when my hopes were revived by a sudden and unexpected change. * * *