“You know Miss Bell has invited me to spend a month with her at Fiesole.  I have accepted; I am going.”

Less astonished than discontented, he asked her with whom she was going.

At once she answered: 

“With Madame Marmet.”

There was no objection to make.  Madame Marmet was a proper companion, and it was appropriate for her to visit Italy, where her husband had made some excavations.  He asked only: 

“Have you invited her?  When are you going?”

“Next week.”

He had the wisdom not to make any objection, judging that opposition would only make her capriciousness firmer, and fearing to give impetus to that foolish idea.  He said: 

“Surely, to travel is an agreeable pastime.  I thought that we might in the spring visit the Caucasus and Turkestan.  There is an interesting country.  General Annenkoff will place at our disposal carriages, trains, and everything else on his railway.  He is a friend of mine; he is quite charmed with you.  He will provide us with an escort of Cossacks.”

He persisted in trying to flatter her vanity, unable to realize that her mind was not worldly.  She replied, negligently, that it might be a pleasant trip.  Then he praised the mountains, the ancient cities, the bazaars, the costumes, the armor.

He added: 

“We shall take some friends with us—­Princess Seniavine, General Lariviere, perhaps Vence or Le Menil.”

She replied, with a little dry laugh, that they had time to select their guests.

He became attentive to her wants.

“You are not eating.  You will injure your health.”

Without yet believing in this prompt departure, he felt some anxiety about it.  Each had regained freedom, but he did not like to be alone.  He felt that he was himself only when his wife was there.  And then, he had decided to give two or three political dinners during the session.  He saw his party growing.  This was the moment to assert himself, to make a dazzling show.  He said, mysteriously: 

“Something might happen requiring the aid of all our friends.  You have not followed the march of events, Therese?”

“No, my dear.”

“I am sorry.  You have judgment, liberality of mind.  If you had followed the march of events you would have been struck by the current that is leading the country back to moderate opinions.  The country is tired of exaggerations.  It rejects the men compromised by radical politics and religious persecution.  Some day or other it will be necessary to make over a Casimir-Perier ministry with other men, and that day—­”

He stopped:  really she listened too inattentively.

She was thinking, sad and disenchanted.  It seemed to her that the pretty woman, who, among the warm shadows of a closed room, placed her bare feet in the fur of the brown bear rug, and to whom her lover gave kisses while she twisted her hair in front of a glass, was not herself, was not even a woman that she knew well, or that she desired to know, but a person whose affairs were of no interest to her.  A pin badly set in her hair, one of the pins from the Bohemian glass cup, fell on her neck.  She shivered.