him, meaning carefully and discreetly to look after him. No doubt he was
too much absorbed in doing so to look after himself. Love passed by and
caught him.

She was a little fair girl, charmingly slender, with soft hair waving in
little ripples about her pure narrow forehead: she had fine eyebrows and
rather heavy eyelids, eyes of a periwinkle blue, a delicately carved
nose with sensitive nostrils; her temples were slightly hollowed: she
had a capricious chin, and a mobile, witty, and rather sensual mouth,
turning up at the corners, and the _Parmigianninesque_ smile of a
pure faun. She had a long, delicate throat, a pretty waist, a slender,
elegant figure, and a happy, pensive expression in her girlish face, in
every line of which there was the disturbing poetic mystery of the
waking spring,--_Fruhlingserwachen_. Her name was Jacqueline Langeais.

She was not twenty. She came of a rich Catholic family, of great
distinction and broad-mindedness. Her father was a clever engineer, a
man of some invention, clear-headed and open to new ideas, who had made
a fortune, thanks to his own hard work, his political connections, and
his marriage. He had married both for love and money--(the proper
marriage for love for such people)--a pretty woman, very Parisian, who
was bred in the world of finance. The money had stayed: but love had
gone. However, he had managed to preserve a few sparks of it, for it had
been very ardent on both sides: but they did not stickle for any
exaggerated notion of fidelity. They went their ways and had their
pleasures: and they got on very well together, as friends, selfishly,
unscrupulously, warily.

Their daughter was a bond between them, though she was the object of an
unspoken rivalry between them: for they both loved her jealously. They