Fromont and Risler, vol 2 | Page 5

she knew nothing. Claire did her
best to help her, to keep her on the surface, with a friendly hand always
outstretched; but many of these ladies thought Sidonie pretty; that was
enough to make them bear her a grudge for seeking admission to their
circle. Others, proud of their husbands' standing and of their wealth,
could not invent enough unspoken affronts and patronizing phrases to
humiliate the little parvenue.
Sidonie included them all in a single phrase: "Claire's friends--that is to
say, my enemies!" But she was seriously incensed against but one.
The two partners had no suspicion of what was taking place between
their wives. Risler, continually engrossed in his press, sometimes
remained at his draughting-table until midnight. Fromont passed his
days abroad, lunched at his club, was almost never at the factory. He
had his reasons for that.
Sidonie's proximity disturbed him. His capricious passion for her, that
passion that he had sacrificed to his uncle's last wishes, recurred too
often to his memory with all the regret one feels for the irreparable; and,
conscious that he was weak, he fled. His was a pliable nature, without
sustaining purpose, intelligent enough to appreciate his failings, too
weak to guide itself. On the evening of Risler's wedding-- he had been
married but a few months himself--he had experienced anew, in that
woman's presence, all the emotion of the stormy evening at Savigny.
Thereafter, without self-examination, he avoided seeing her again or
speaking with her. Unfortunately, as they lived in the same house, as
their wives saw each other ten times a day, chance sometimes brought
them together; and this strange thing happened--that the husband,
wishing to remain virtuous, deserted his home altogether and sought
distraction elsewhere.

Claire was not astonished that it was so. She had become accustomed,
during her father's lifetime, to the constant comings and goings of a
business life; and during her husband's absences, zealously performing
her duties as wife and mother, she invented long tasks, occupations of
all sorts, walks for the child, prolonged, peaceful tarryings in the
sunlight, from which she would return home, overjoyed with the little
one's progress, deeply impressed with the gleeful enjoyment of all
infants in the fresh air, but with a touch of their radiance in the depths
of her serious eyes.
Sidonie also went out a great deal. It often happened, toward night, that
Georges's carriage, driving through the gateway, would compel
Madame Risler to step hastily aside as she was returning in a gorgeous
costume from a triumphal promenade. The boulevard, the
shop-windows, the purchases, made after long deliberation as if to
enjoy to the full the pleasure of purchasing, detained her very late.
They would exchange a bow, a cold glance at the foot of the staircase;
and Georges would hurry into his apartments, as into a place of refuge,
concealing beneath a flood of caresses, bestowed upon the child his
wife held out to him, the sudden emotion that had seized him.
Sidonie, for her part, seemed to have forgotten everything, and to have
retained no other feeling but contempt for that weak, cowardly creature.
Moreover, she had many other things to think about.
Her husband had just had a piano placed in her red salon, between the
windows.
After long hesitation she had decided to learn to sing, thinking that it
was rather late to begin to play the piano; and twice a week Madame
Dobson, a pretty, sentimental blonde, came to give her lessons from
twelve o'clock to one. In the silence of the neighborhood the a-a-a and
o-oo, persistently prolonged, repeated again and again, with windows
open, gave the factory the atmosphere of a boarding-school.
And it was in reality a schoolgirl who was practising these exercises, an
inexperienced, wavering little soul, full of unconfessed longings, with
everything to learn and to find out in order to become a real woman.

But her ambition confined itself to a superficial aspect of things.
"Claire Fromont plays the piano; I will sing. She is considered a refined
and distinguished woman, and I intend that people shall say the same of
me."
Without a thought of improving her education, Sidonie passed her life
running about among milliners and dressmakers. "What are people
going to wear this winter?" was her cry. She was attracted by the
gorgeous displays in the shop-windows, by everything that caught the
eye of the passers-by.
The one thing that Sidonie envied Claire more than all else was the
child, the luxurious plaything, beribboned from the curtains of its
cradle to its nurse's cap. She did not think of the sweet, maternal duties,
demanding patience and self-abnegation, of the long rockings when
sleep would not come, of the laughing awakenings sparkling with fresh
water. No! she saw in the child naught but the