Had she not written the anonymous letters to Gorka, denouncing to him
the intrigue between Maitland and Madame Steno? Was it not she who had
chosen, the better to poison those terrible letters, phrases the most
likely to strike the betrayed lover in the most sensitive part of his
'amour propre'? Was it not she who had hastened the return of the
jealous man with the certain hope of drawing thus a tragical vengeance
upon the hated heads of her husband and the Venetian? That vengeance,
indeed, had broken. But upon whom? Upon the only person Lydia loved in
the world, upon the brother whom she saw endangered through her fault;
and that thought was to her so overwhelming that she sank into the
armchair in which Florent had been seated fifteen minutes before,
repeating, with an accent of despair: "He is going to fight a duel. He
is going to fight instead of the other!"

All the moral history of that obscure and violent soul was summed up in
the cry in which passionate anxiety for her brother was coupled with a
fierce hatred of her husband. That hatred was the result of a youth and
a childhood without the story of which a duplicity so criminal in a being
so young would be unintelligible. That youth and that childhood had
presaged what Lydia would one day be. But who was there to train the
nature in which the heredity of an oppressed race manifested itself, as
has been already remarked, by the two most detestable characteristics--
hypocrisy and perfidy? Who, moreover, observes in children the truth, as
much neglected in practise as it is common in theory, that the defects of
the tenth year become vices in the thirtieth? When quite a child Lydia
invented falsehoods as naturally as her brother spoke the truth....
Whosoever observed her would have perceived that those lies were all told
to paint herself in a favorable light. The germ, too, of another defect
was springing up within her--a jealousy instinctive, irrational, almost