military duties, had a place at Court, to which he came during
his term of waiting, leaving his major-general in command. The
Duke and Duchess were leading lives entirely apart, the world
none the wiser. Their marriage of convention shared the fate of
nearly all family arrangements of the kind. Two more
antipathetic dispositions could not well have been found; they
were brought together; they jarred upon each other; there was
soreness on either side; then they were divided once for all.
Then they went their separate ways, with a due regard for
appearances. The Duc de Langeais, by nature as methodical as the
Chevalier de Folard himself, gave himself up methodically to his
own tastes and amusements, and left his wife at liberty to do as
she pleased so soon as he felt sure of her character. He
recognised in her a spirit pre-eminently proud, a cold heart, a
profound submissiveness to the usages of the world, and a
youthful loyalty. Under the eyes of great relations, with the
light of a prudish and bigoted Court turned full upon the
Duchess, his honour was safe.

So the Duke calmly did as the _grands seigneurs_ of the eighteenth
century did before him, and left a young wife of two-and-twenty
to her own devices. He had deeply offended that wife, and in her
nature there was one appalling characteristic--she would never
forgive an offence when woman's vanity and self-love, with all
that was best in her nature perhaps, had been slighted, wounded
in secret. Insult and injury in the face of the world a woman
loves to forget; there is a way open to her of showing herself
great; she is a woman in her forgiveness; but a secret offence
women never pardon; for secret baseness, as for hidden virtues
and hidden love, they have no kindness.