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Rh placing themselves, perhaps consciously, apart from other people.

He noticed, too, that they never addressed his wife as "madame la marquise," but by her maiden name of Pozzo-Paoli, and when he mentioned it to her, half jesting and half bitter, she replied that they were right.

"Marriage," she said, "is the matter of one life—of two lives, rather—which begins with a priest's mumbled words and which stops at the grave. But my name, my clan, my blood—why, mon pauvre ami, it is like this land—eternal—the result of centuries and centuries and centuries!"

He loved her. In a way, he was happy. But he felt the barrier which was between him and her, and he tried to analyze and dissect it in his sane, logical French way.

At first he ascribed it to the difference in the sex relations which exist north and south—the difference which in the north, in France and England, gives the erotic superiority and aggressiveness to the man, and in the south to the woman, together with a sort of intense and grave adjustment of nervous energy.