A POLITICIAN'S MARRIAGE She was not quite in love with him, but she wished him to be in love with her.

She was, moreover, very reserved with him, and that not solely from any want of inclination to be otherwise, since in affairs of love some things are due to indifference, to inattention, to woman's instinct, to traditional custom and feeling, to a desire to try one's power, and to satisfaction at seeing its results.

The reason of her prudence was that she knew him to be very much infatuated and capable of taking advantage of any familiarities she allowed as well as of reproaching her coarsely afterwards if she discontinued them.
As he was a professed anti-clerical and free-thinker, she thought it a good plan to affect an appearance of piety in his presence and to be seen with prayer-books bound in red morocco, such as Queen Marie Leczinska's or the Dauphiness Marie Josephine's "The Last Two Weeks of Lent." She lost no opportunity, either, of showing him the subscriptions that she collected for the endowment of the national cult of St.
Orberosia.

Eveline did not act in this way because she wished to tease him.

Nor did it spring from a young girl's archness, or a spirit of constraint, or even from snobbishness, though there was more than a suspicion of this latter in her behaviour.