She never had her hair dressed or made her toilette without minutely questioning her maid as to the goings-on in the pantry and the antechamber.

It was through a story of that kind that she learned the altercation between Florent and Gorka in the vestibule, which proves, between parentheses, that these espionages by the aid of servants are often efficacious.

But they reveal a native baseness, which will not recoil before any piece of villainy.
When Madame Maitland suspected the liaison of Madame Steno and her husband, she no more hesitated to open the latter's secretary than she later hesitated to open the desk of her brother.

The correspondence which she read in that way was of a nature which exasperated her desire for vengeance almost to frenzy.

For not only did she acquire the evidence of a happiness shared by them which humiliated in her the woman barren in all senses of the word, a stranger to voluptuousness as well as to maternity, but she gathered from it numerous proofs that the Countess cherished, with regard to her, a scorn of race as absolute as if Venice had been a city of the United States....