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altogether to their disadvantage. If she had been poor like them, she would have had to eat her heart out in widowhood among her familiar and vigilant surroundings until the proper and valid distraction was offered; she would not have been able to run about the world making experiments in oblivion, and she would not have experimented so rashly. The high degree of security she enjoyed thanks to her money had persuaded her that practically nothing she could do could bring her into serious difficulties.
    André, too, she thought, would have been in some ways the better without his wealth. Had he been a poor man, he would not have been free to spend his whole life proving a silly point about his power by leaving women who wanted him to stay with them and staying with women who wanted him to leave them. Really, she reflected, he was not a fool, for he knew that perfectly well. In realizing exactly what he owed to the status quo he was cleverer than the more intellectually active Laurence or the more practically effective Marc Sallafranque, who both regarded their lives as purely individual achievements, which they could have made the same in any world. André was well aware that anything that threatened the existing conditions of society threatened him with extinction. He spoke with equally personal dread of the growth of Communism, of the rearming of Germany, of the imprudence of anyone belonging to his own class who, by adoption of an extreme religious or political faith, or by a gratuitous divorce, or by clamant bad manners, became the subject of adverse public comment. The structure must not even be shaken.
    At that Isabelle sat up in bed and stared at the opposite wall. That, of course, was the secret of her attraction for André. He had recognized her fundamental temperance, her inaptitude for any kind of violence; he knew that in her company he could play with danger to his heart’s content, that no matter how he challenged her to misbehaviour, she would perpetually be moderate. He loved what he feared, as spirits sapped with luxury always do. The thought of screaming and shouting men made his heart stop with terror; it gave him therefore an immense pleasure to raise his voice and hear what a scream and a shout sounded like; and he knew that in the stillness of her atmosphere all such violent noises were at once annulled. Suddenly she realized the true nature of the problem before her. All she had to do was to convince him that his impression of her character was false: that she had within her a maenad, who might some day break loose, answer his raised voice by her own screams and shouts, and invoke the forces of disorder. A single uncontrolled gesture would bring about this change of view, for the first hint of this hidden self of hers would make him so nervous that he would lose his usual critical faculty. But control was obstinately a part of all her nature, even including her imagination. She murmured, “But what can I do, what can I do?” and slid her feet out of bed, feeling for her slippers, as if moving her body would make her mind move too. She rose and pulled on her peignoir, and then became suddenly motionless, staring again at the wall; and indeed she saw what she had to do as if it were written there. Shuddering with distaste, she said, “That would do! Yes, that would do!” and went to the waste-paper basket and took out André’s flowers.

II
    SHE LIKED so little what she had to do, and knew so well what happiness lay on the other side of doing it, that all the morning she was trembling with nervousness. Her hands shook, her mind shook; she was a trifle stupid. When Sallafranque rang her up and asked her at what time he might see her, a rush of tenderness for his affectionate simplicity made her desire that he might know about Laurence and herself sooner than anybody else and count as her first friend to be adopted as their friend; so she told him that she was lunching with a friend at Laurent’s and