Now Robert de Ligny was causing him intolerable suffering.

For some time past he had found him incessantly dangling about her.

He could not doubt that she loved Robert; and although he sometimes told himself that she had not yet given herself to this man, it was not that he believed it, but merely that he was fain sometimes to mitigate the bitterness of his sufferings.
Mechanical applause broke out at the back of the theatre, and a few members of the orchestra, murmuring inaudibly, clapped their hands slowly and noiselessly.

Nanteuil had just given her last reply to Jeanne Perrin.
"_Brava! Brava!_ She is delightful, dear little woman!" sighed Madame Doulce.
In his jealous anger, Chevalier was disloyal.

Lifting a finger to his forehead, he remarked: "She plays with _that_." Then, placing his hand upon his heart, he added: "It is with this that one should act." "Thanks, dear friend, thanks!" murmured Madame Doulce, who read into these maxims an obvious eulogy of herself.
She was, indeed, in the habit of asserting that all good acting comes from the heart; she maintained that, to give full expression to a passion, it was necessary to experience it, and to feel in one's own person the expressions that one wished to represent.