of curiosity was so strong that she could not refrain, at a telegraph
office, from glancing over the shoulders of the persons before her, to
learn the contents of their despatches. She never had her hair dressed
or made her toilette without minutely questioning her maid as to the
goings-on in the pantry and the antechamber. It was through a story of
that kind that she learned the altercation between Florent and Gorka in
the vestibule, which proves, between parentheses, that these espionages
by the aid of servants are often efficacious. But they reveal a native
baseness, which will not recoil before any piece of villainy.

When Madame Maitland suspected the liaison of Madame Steno and her
husband, she no more hesitated to open the latter's secretary than she
later hesitated to open the desk of her brother. The correspondence
which she read in that way was of a nature which exasperated her desire
for vengeance almost to frenzy. For not only did she acquire the
evidence of a happiness shared by them which humiliated in her the woman
barren in all senses of the word, a stranger to voluptuousness as well as
to maternity, but she gathered from it numerous proofs that the Countess
cherished, with regard to her, a scorn of race as absolute as if Venice
had been a city of the United States.... That part of the Adriatic
abounds in prejudices of blood, as do all countries which serve as
confluents for every nation. It is sufficient to convince one's self of
it, to have heard a Venetian treat of the Slavs as 'Cziavoni', and the
Levantines as 'Gregugni'.

Madame Steno, in those letters she had written with all the familiarity
and all the liberty of passion, never called Lydia anything but La
Morettina, and by a very strange illogicalness never was the name of the
brother of La Morettina mentioned without a formula of friendship. As
the mistress treated Florent in that manner, it must be that she