'Bless me—no!' cried Paul. 'I should have too much to do. Ah! Suzanne,' he added, suddenly changing his tone to one that betrayed deep feeling, 'what pain it must be to harbour suspicions! Just fancy me being jealous of you, and having to sit in the office all day whilst my heart was being torn by doubts! Ah! well,' this with a shrewd look, 'I would set Desforges to watch you!'
'It's lucky there was no one to hear his "joke,"' thought Suzanne when she was alone. 'He has a silly way of saying these things, too, when he's out.' René's letter had, however, put her in such a good temper that she forgot to get angry, as she would do when she thought her husband too utterly simple. Such is the logic of these pretty and light-hearted sinners; they will exercise all their wits in blindfolding a man, and then blame him for stumbling. The fact of having deceived him does not satisfy them—he must only be deceived up to a certain point. If he goes beyond that it is too much—he makes them feel uneasy, and they hate him for it—sincerely. Suzanne contented herself with a shrug of her shoulders and a look of sweet pity. Then she took the letter from its hiding-place and read it for the third time.
'It's quite true,' she said aloud; 'he is not like other men.'
Thereupon she fell into a deep reverie, in which she saw the poet as she had seen him waiting for her at the Louvre, standing just under the large Veronese canvas with his face turned a little to the right. How agitated he had been when his eyes met hers! How young he was! How his lips had trembled when he told her a little later that he loved her—those full, fresh lips which she could have bitten like some fruit, after having caressed his fair cheeks and the soft silken beard that adorned his manly face. But the fruit was not yet ripe; she must learn to wait. She sighed. Her calculation that the poet would write that very letter, and so soon after their meeting, too, had proved correct. She had made up her mind not to reply to it, nor yet to the second. For this second letter she waited one, two, three days. Though her confidence in the strength of the passion with which she had inspired René was unshaken, she was somewhat startled when, on the afternoon of the third day, just as her brougham was turning the corner of the Rue Murillo, she saw him standing where she had seen him once before. She was very careful to look as though she had not noticed him, and put on her saddest expression, her most dreamy eyes and an air of sweet resignation that would have moved a tiger. The comfortable brougham, furnished with a number of dainty and useful knick-knacks, was immediately transformed in René's eyes into a prison van containing a martyr—a martyr to her husband, a martyr to her home, a martyr to her love, and a martyr to her virtue.
She was not acting a very great lie, either, as she passed René. As she saw the pallor on his cheeks, caused by three days' anguish, and the look of despair in his eyes, she would have given much to be able to stop the brougham, to get out or to make him get in, and to exclaim as she carried him off, 'I love you as much as you love me!' Instead of that she drove on to do her shopping and pay her calls, sure now that the second letter so impatiently expected would not be long in coming. It came the same afternoon, but just when its arrival presented most danger. And for this reason. Having gone home immediately after meeting Suzanne, René had written her four pages in feverish haste, and in order that they might reach her sooner and more safely, he had sent them about five o'clock by a commissionaire; the letter was therefore handed to Suzanne by her manservant whilst Desforges was with her. He had come, as he often did at that hour, with a dainty little present; this time it was a pretty needle-case in old gold which he had picked up at a sale.
No sooner had she recognised the writing on the envelope than she said to herself, 'The least sign of emotion and the Baron will smell a rat!' As sometimes happens, the fear of betraying her agitation made it more difficult for her to conceal it. She took the letter, looked at the address as we do when trying to guess from whom a communication comes, tore it open and skimmed its contents, after having first cast a glance at the signature; then, getting up to place it amongst some others on her desk, she said:
'Another, begging letter! It's astonishing how many I've had lately. How do you manage with them, Frédéric?'
'I have a very simple plan,' replied the Baron. 'Fifty francs the first time of asking, twenty francs the second, nothing the third. My secretary has orders to that effect. That's one of the fads I don't believe in—charity! Just as if it were through want of money that the poor are poor! It's their disposition that has made them so, and that you'll never change. Look here, take this person who is sponging on you to-day; I'll bet twenty-five pounds that if you inquire about him you'll find that fortune, or at least a competency, has been in his grasp ten times during his life. If you were to set him up afresh he would be in the same plight in a few years from now. Not that I mind giving, and as much as people want—but as to believing that money so spent is of the least use, that's a different thing altogether. And then these benefactors and lady patronesses—I know them; it's all advertisement—a means of making their way into Society and of getting hold of good people.'
'That's enough,' said Suzanne, 'you are a terrible sceptic.' And with that delicate irony that women sometimes use in avenging themselves upon the man who compels them to lie, she added, 'You're not one to be easily duped.'
The Baron accepted this flattery with a smile. Had his suspicions been aroused, that phrase alone would have lulled them. The most cunning men have that weak point by which they can always be conquered—vanity. But suspicion of any kind had been far from the Baron's mind. Suzanne deceived him as easily as René had deceived his sister. Those who see us every day are the last to perceive what would be evident to the merest stranger. That is because the stranger comes to us without any preconceived idea, whilst our daily associates have formed an opinion about us which they do not take the trouble to verify or change. The Baron therefore did not remark that Suzanne was that afternoon a prey to intense agitation, which lasted during the whole of his visit. He stayed rather longer than usual, too, telling her all sorts of club stories, while she pottered about in the room, under some pretence or other, with one eye on her letter, seizing it once more with delight as soon as Desforges had at last decided to go.