long time in understanding (but I grew sharp by dint of watching your
thoughts and actions): You attached yourself to your children with all
the security which they gave you while I bore them. You felt affection
for them, with all your aversion to me, and in spite of your ignoble
fears, which were momentarily allayed by your pleasure in seeing me lose
my symmetry.

"Oh! how often have I noticed that joy in you! I have seen it in your
eyes and guessed it. You loved your children as victories, and not
because they were of your own blood. They were victories over me, over my
youth, over my beauty, over my charms, over the compliments which were
paid me and over those that were whispered around me without being paid
to me personally. And you are proud of them, you make a parade of them,
you take them out for drives in your break in the Bois de Boulogne and
you give them donkey rides at Montmorency. You take them to theatrical
matinees so that you may be seen in the midst of them, so that the people
may say: 'What a kind father' and that it may be repeated----"

He had seized her wrist with savage brutality, and he squeezed it so
violently that she was quiet and nearly cried out with the pain and he
said to her in a whisper:

"I love my children, do you hear? What you have just told me is
disgraceful in a mother. But you belong to me; I am master--your
master--I can exact from you what I like and when I like--and
I have the law-on my side."

He was trying to crush her fingers in the strong grip of his large,
muscular hand, and she, livid with pain, tried in vain to free them from
that vise which was crushing them. The agony made her breathe hard and