mistakes of a foreigner, though they end by annoying us if they are
not corrected.

In spite of all this love-making, by the end of this year, as
delightful as it was swift, Sommervieux felt one morning the need for
resuming his work and his old habits. His wife was expecting their
first child. He saw some friends again. During the tedious discomforts
of the year when a young wife is nursing an infant for the first time,
he worked, no doubt, with zeal, but he occasionally sought diversion
in the fashionable world. The house which he was best pleased to
frequent was that of the Duchesse de Carigliano, who had at last
attracted the celebrated artist to her parties. When Augustine was
quite well again, and her boy no longer required the assiduous care
which debars a mother from social pleasures, Theodore had come to the
stage of wishing to know the joys of satisfied vanity to be found in
society by a man who shows himself with a handsome woman, the object
of envy and admiration.

To figure in drawing-rooms with the reflected lustre of her husband's
fame, and to find other women envious of her, was to Augustine a new
harvest of pleasures; but it was the last gleam of conjugal happiness.
She first wounded her husband's vanity when, in spite of vain efforts,
she betrayed her ignorance, the inelegance of her language, and the
narrowness of her ideas. Sommervieux's nature, subjugated for nearly
two years and a half by the first transports of love, now, in the calm
of less new possession, recovered its bent and habits, for a while
diverted from their channel. Poetry, painting, and the subtle joys of
imagination have inalienable rights over a lofty spirit. These
cravings of a powerful soul had not been starved in Theodore during
these two years; they had only found fresh pasture. As soon as the