power, she would coquet with him like a capricious mistress who takes
delight in tormenting a lover. This hateful strategy was the only
possible way out of her troubles. In this way she would become
mistress of the situation; she would prescribe her own sufferings at
her good pleasure, and reduce them by enslaving her husband, and
bringing him under a tyrannous yoke. She felt not the slightest
remorse for the hard life which he should lead. At a bound she reached
cold, calculating indifference--for her daughter's sake. She had
gained a sudden insight into the treacherous, lying arts of degraded
women; the wiles of coquetry, the revolting cunning which arouses such
profound hatred in men at the mere suspicion of innate corruption in a
woman.

Julie's feminine vanity, her interests, and a vague desire to inflict
punishment, all wrought unconsciously with the mother's love within
her to force her into a path where new sufferings awaited her. But her
nature was too noble, her mind too fastidious, and, above all things,
too open, to be the accomplice of these frauds for very long.
Accustomed as she was to self-scrutiny, at the first step in vice--for
vice it was--the cry of conscience must inevitably drown the clamor of
the passions and of selfishness. Indeed, in a young wife whose heart
is still pure, whose love has never been mated, the very sentiment of
motherhood is overpowered by modesty. Modesty; is not all womanhood
summed up in that? But just now Julie would not see any danger,
anything wrong, in her life.

She went to Mme. de Serizy's concert. Her rival had expected to see a
pallid, drooping woman. The Marquise wore rouge, and appeared in all
the splendor of a toilet which enhanced her beauty.