Having uttered this tirade, improvised for the hundredth time, she played the pupils of her eyes in a way to double the effect of her words, which seemed to be dragged from the depths of her soul by the violence of a torrent long restrained.  Calyste, incapable of speech, let fall the tears that gathered in his eyes.  Beatrix caught his hand and pressed it, making him turn pale.

“Thank you, Calyste, thank you, my poor child; that is how a true friend responds to the grief of his friend.  We understand each other.  No, don’t add another word; leave me now; people are looking at us; it might cause trouble to your wife if some one chanced to tell her that we were seen together,—­innocently enough, before a thousand people!  There, you see I am strong; adieu—­”

She wiped her eyes, making what might be called, in woman’s rhetoric, an antithesis of action.

“Let me laugh the laugh of a lost soul with the careless creatures who amuse me,” she went on.  “I live among artists, writers, in short the world I knew in the salon of our poor Camille—­who may indeed have acted wisely.  To enrich the man we love and then to disappear saying, ‘I am too old for him!’ that is ending like the martyrs,—­and the best end too, if one cannot die a virgin.”

She began to laugh, as it to remove the melancholy impression she had made upon her former adorer.

“But,” said Calyste, “where can I go to see you?”

“I am hidden in the rue de Chartres opposite the Parc de Monceaux, in a little house suitable to my means; and there I cram my head with literature—­but only for myself, to distract my thoughts; God keep me from the mania of literary women!  Now go, leave me; I must not allow the world to talk of me; what will it not say on seeing us together!  Adieu—­oh!  Calyste, my friend, if you stay another minute I shall burst into tears!”

Calyste withdrew, after holding out his hand to Beatrix and feeling for the second time that strange and deep sensation of a double pressure—­full of seductive tingling.

“Sabine never knew how to stir my soul in that way,” was the thought that assailed him in the corridor.

During the rest of the evening the Marquise de Rochefide did not cast three straight glances at Calyste, but there were many sidelong looks which tore of the soul of the man now wholly thrown back into his first, repulsed love.

When the baron du Guenic reached home the splendor of his apartments made him think of the sort of mediocrity of which Beatrix had spoken, and he hated his wealth because it could not belong to that fallen angel.  When he was told that Sabine had long been in bed he rejoiced to find himself rich in the possession of a night in which to live over his emotions.  He cursed the power of divination which love had bestowed upon Sabine.  When by chance a man is adored by his wife, she reads on his face as in a book; she learns every quiver of its muscles, she knows whence