It was the first time for two years—since the day, indeed, when she had given herself so freely to him—that Lise had heard from his lips a word that could wound her. On the contrary, up to this time it had always seemed to be his determination to make no reference to the past. The young woman was deeply hurt, but, making a great effort, she replied with a smile, after a momentary silence:
"You are perhaps right, Paul. It is a very simple matter. Until Marie is weaned I will see only our most intimate friends. Are you satisfied? You will always love me, will you not? Our baby will be a year old, too, in a few weeks' time now, so that we can very soon take up our old life again. Would not you wish to, as I do?"
As she spoke Lise had put her arms around her husband's neck. Her bright eyes and the soft pressure of her arms questioned him more than her voice did.
"Why, of course, little woman," the painter replied, giving her quite a fatherly kiss, and gently freeing himself from her clasp. "Meanwhile, Miss Marie is the queen we must all bow before. Even I must come after her. And so good-night."
So saying, he went to the little room next his studio, where he had chosen to sleep since his wife's confinement, on the pretense that the baby, whose cradle was near its mother's bed throughout the night, hindered him sleeping.
Left alone, Mme. Meyrin felt a pain at her heart. She had a foreboding of evil. Her husband's love for her had undergone a change. Affrighted at this thought, she rose and thought of hurrying after him, but at that moment the child awoke, and the mother, suddenly reminded of the most sacred of duties, ran to it, took it in her arms, and, her tears falling, began to soothe and rock it.
The unhappy truth was that, less gratified in his vanity, jealous, so to speak, of Lise's love for her infant, and restricted in his passion, Paul, during the past few months, had grown little by little more indifferent about the woman who was no longer for him the mistress he had desired ardently, rather than tenderly loved. She was no longer the creature of radiant beauty and sculptural symmetry, seductively attractive, and of ardent passions. She was the mother devoted to a thousand little cares and continual obligations, which the egotism of her husband hindered him from understanding; and sometimes her health would fail.
The motherhood, which should have made her companionship the more dear, was an annoyance and an obstacle for a man of his animal instincts. He did not see his daughter's smiles; he heard only her cries, and they irritated and troubled him at his work. Without admitting it to himself, he had come to the pass of regarding Lise's intellectual qualities as a drawback. Her learning, the distinction and elegance of her manners, which formerly had flattered his vanity so much at her receptions of his friends, now humiliated his vulgar nature, and seemed to him both useless and absurd. He often left home in consequence to seek elsewhere the life from which he had been absent only temporarily, in a kind of exile, a sort of flight into higher regions for which he was not born. There was at all times a trait of character native to him which the intoxication of passion had been able to master, while leaving him incapable of understanding what concerns the soul.
Mme. Meyrin had the instinct rather than the feeling of a change in the man she loved as she had always loved him; but in finding that he at times returned to her with the passionate transports of former times she lost her fears, and even blamed herself for ever having felt them.
So they went on for some months. Then, soon, after these momentary revivals of passion, Paul grew more and more of a grumbler—more and more ready to criticise and find fault in trifling things. Lise feared, then, that her happiness was threatened—above all, when his absence became habitual.