If the fury that boiled within him verged on hatred it was that he felt her to be even more guilty towards him than toward his father.
The love of man and wife is a voluntary compact in which the one who proves weak is guilty only of perfidy; but when the wife is a mother her duty is a higher one, since nature has intrusted her with a race.

If she fails, then she is cowardly, worthless, infamous.
"I do not care," said Roland suddenly, stretching out his legs under the table, as he did every evening while he sipped his glass of black-currant brandy.

"You may do worse than live idle when you have a snug little income.

I hope Jean will have us to dinner in style now.
Hang it all! If I have indigestion now and then I cannot help it." Then turning to his wife he added: "Go and fetch that portrait, little woman, as you have done your dinner.
I should like to see it again myself." She rose, took a taper, and went.

Then, after an absence which Pierre thought long, though she was not away more than three minutes, Mme.
Roland returned smiling, and holding an old-fashioned gilt frame by the ring.
"Here it is," said she, "I found it at once." The doctor was the first to put forth his hand; he took the picture, and holding it a little away from him, he examined it.