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Rh kept on speaking, all could not be over. Mathilde had not listened to his words; their sound irritated her. She could not conceive how he could have the audacity to interrupt her.

She was rendered equally unhappy this morning by remorseful virtue and remorseful pride. She felt to some extent pulverised by the idea of having given a little abbé, who was the son of a peasant, rights over her. "It is almost," she said to herself, in those moments when she exaggerated her own misfortune, "as though I had a weakness for one of my footmen to reproach myself with." In bold, proud natures there is only one step from anger against themselves to wrath against others. In these cases the very transports of fury constitute a vivid pleasure.

In a single minute mademoiselle de la Mole reached the point of loading Julien with the signs of the most extreme contempt. She had infinite wit, and this wit was always triumphant in the art of torturing vanity and wounding it cruelly.

For the first time in his life Julien found himself subjected to the energy of a superior intellect, which was animated against him by the most violent hate. Far from having at present the slightest thought of defending himself, he came to despise himself. Hearing himself overwhelmed with such marks of contempt which were so cleverly calculated to destroy any good opinion that he might have of himself, he thought that Mathilde was right, and that she did not say enough.

As for her, she found it deliciously gratifying to her pride to punish in this way both herself and him for the adoration that she had felt some days previously.

She did not have to invent and improvise the cruel remarks which she addressed to him with so much gusto.

All she had to do was to repeat what the advocate of the other side had been saying against her love in her own heart for the last eight days.

Each word intensified a hundredfold Julien's awful unhappiness. He wanted to run away, but mademoiselle de la Mole took hold of his arm authoritatively.

"Be good enough to remark," he said to her, "that you are talking very loud. You will be heard in the next room."

"What does it matter?" mademoiselle de la Mole answered haughtily. "Who will dare to say they have heard me? I