He was untrue to himself, was a dissembler before himself and others: it lay in the inexorable logic of things that he must suffer for it.

But what a shipwreck! After a pure and dignified life, wholly filled up by duty and a striving after knowledge, entirely devoted to warring against the animal element in man, and to educating himself up to an ideal standard of freedom from ignoble instincts, thus shamefully to choke and drown in the muddy lees of a love-potion! Pilar, who fancied him reconciled to the situation, grew easier in her mind, and by degrees lost much of her distrust.

About a month later, toward the middle of March, she had so far regained her equanimity as to allow herself, after a steady resistance, to be persuaded by a friend to attend her house-warming ball--"pendre la cremaillere," as they call it in Paris.

The friend was quite as superstitious as Pilar herself, and had vowed a hundred times over that she would have no luck in her new house if Pilar were absent from the opening ball.
It was not till ten o'clock in the evening that she finally made up her mind.

She waited till Wilhelm had gone to bed, and then sent for Isabel, and shut herself up with her in the boudoir.