having, to respond to his easily awakened desires, fashionable women,
whose modesty is so fragile, women of the demi-monde of the theater,
prodigal of their favors with such men as he. One of them, some evening
after supper, might follow him and please him, take him and keep him.

Thus she lived in terror of losing him, watching his manner, his
attitudes, startled by a word, full of anguish when he admired another
woman, praised the charm of her countenance or her grace of bearing. All
of which she was ignorant in his life made her tremble, and all of which
she was cognizant alarmed her. At each of their meetings she questioned
him ingeniously, without his perceiving it, in order to make him express
his opinion on the people he had seen, the houses where he had dined, in
short, the lightest expression of his mind. As soon as she fancied
she detected the influence of some other person, she combated it with
prodigious astuteness and innumerable resources.

Oh, how often did she suspect those brief intrigues, without depth,
lasting perhaps a week or two, from time to time, which come into the
life of every prominent artist!

She had, as it were, an intuition of danger, even before she detected
the awakening of a new desire in Olivier, by the look of triumph in his
eyes, the expression of a man when swayed by a gallant fancy.

Then she would suffer; her sleep would be tortured by doubts. In order
to surprise him, she would appear suddenly in his studio, without giving
him notice of her coming, put questions that seemed naïve, tested his
tenderness while listening to his thoughts, as we test while listening
to detect hidden illness in the body. She would weep as soon as she
found herself sure that some one would take him from her this time,