She maintained the same attitude with her husband, whose constant kindness and indulgence never had succeeded in triumphing over that humiliated, taciturn nature, indifferent to everything, and, in some sense, irresponsible.

Having passed her life with no knowledge of business, she had become rich without knowing it and without the slightest desire to take advantage of it.

Her fine apartments in Paris, her father's magnificent chateau, made her uncomfortable.

She occupied as small a place as possible in both, filling her life with a single passion, order--a fantastic, abnormal sort of order, which consisted in brushing, wiping, dusting, and polishing the mirrors, the gilding and the door-knobs, with her own hands, from morning till night.
When she had nothing else to clean, the strange woman would attack her rings, her watch-chain, her brooches, scrubbing the cameos and pearls, and, by dint of polishing the combination of her own name and her husband's, she had effaced all the letters of both.

Her fixed idea followed her to Savigny.