'Wanda writes to you every day?' she asked once.
'She writes often,' he answered.
'And what does she say of me?'
'Nothing!'
'Nothing? What does she write about? Of the priest's sermons and the horses' coughs, of how much wood has been cut, and how many shoes the children wear, of how she sorrows for you, and says Latin prayers for you twice a day?'
His face darkened.
'Madame my cousin,' he said irritably, 'will you understand that men do not like their religion spoken lightly of? My wife is my religion.'
Then Madame Olga laughed with silvery, hysterical laughter, and clapped her hands as if she were applauding a good comedy, and cried shrilly: 'Oh! la bonne blague!'
But she knew very well that it was not 'blague.' She knew very well, too, that though he was subjugated by a certain sorcery when in her presence, when absent, his good taste condemned, and his good sense escaped, her. She was one of those women who have a thousand means of usurping a man's time, and are not scrupulous if some of those measures are bold ones. All her admirers tacitly left the field open to one for whom she made no scruple of her preference; and, under pretext of her relationship to him, she contrived many ways to bring him beside her. Every day he said to himself that he would go home on the morrow; but each day bore its diversions, its claims, its interests, and each day found him in Paris, sometimes driving her to the Cascade, to St. Germain, to Versailles, sometimes escorting her to the tribune of a race-course, or a première at a theatre, sometimes dining with her in her pretty room, the table strewn with rose-leaves, and the windows open upon flowering orange trees.
When he wrote home he wrote eloquent, witty, clever letters; but he did not speak in them of the woman with whom he spent so much of his time, and his wife as she read them wished that they had been less clever, and had said more. She began to fear lest she had done unwisely. She did not repent, for it seemed to her that she could have done nothing else with any self-esteem; but she dreaded lest she had over-estimated the power of her own memory upon him. Yet even so, she thought, it was better that he should degrade himself and her in her absence than her presence; and she still felt a certainty—baseless, perhaps—that he would yet pause in time before he actually gave her a rival in her cousin's wife.