He came, and as far as possible, I renewed our old pleasure of making tete-a-tete excursions, though, instead of mountains and glacers and the wide blue lake, we had to content ourselves with mere slopes and ponds and artificial plantations.  The years had changed us both, but with what different result!  Meunier was now a brilliant figure in society, to whom elegant women pretended to listen, and whose acquaintance was boasted of by noblemen ambitious of brains.  He repressed with the utmost delicacy all betrayal of the shock which I am sure he must have received from our meeting, or of a desire to penetrate into my condition and circumstances, and sought by the utmost exertion of his charming social powers to make our reunion agreeable.  Bertha was much struck by the unexpected fascinations of a visitor whom she had expected to find presentable only on the score of his celebrity, and put forth all her coquetries and accomplishments.  Apparently she succeeded in attracting his admiration, for his manner towards her was attentive and flattering.  The effect of his presence on me was so benignant, especially in those renewals of our old tete-a-tete wanderings, when he poured forth to me wonderful narratives of his professional experience, that more than once, when his talk turned on the psychological relations of disease, the thought crossed my mind that, if his stay with me were long enough, I might possibly bring myself to tell this man the secrets of my lot.  Might there not lie some remedy for me, too, in his science?  Might there not at least lie some comprehension and sympathy ready for me in his large and susceptible mind?  But the thought only flickered feebly now and then, and died out before it could become a wish.  The horror I had of again breaking in on the privacy of another soul, made me, by an irrational instinct, draw the shroud of concealment more closely around my own, as we automatically perform the gesture we feel to be wanting in another.

When Meunier’s visit was approaching its conclusion, there happened an event which caused some excitement in our household, owing to the surprisingly strong effect it appeared to produce on Bertha—­on Bertha, the self-possessed, who usually seemed inaccessible to feminine agitations, and did even her hate in a self-restrained hygienic manner.  This event was the sudden severe illness of her maid, Mrs. Archer.  I have reserved to this moment the mention of a circumstance which had forced itself on my notice shortly before Meunier’s arrival, namely, that there had been some quarrel between Bertha and this maid, apparently during a visit to a distant family, in which she had accompanied her mistress.  I had overheard Archer speaking in a tone of bitter insolence, which I should have thought an adequate reason for immediate dismissal.  No dismissal followed; on the contrary, Bertha seemed to be silently putting up with personal inconveniences from the exhibitions of this woman’s temper.