de Saint-Euverte's: "I have never seen anything to beat it since the
table-turning." The agony that he now suffered in no way resembled what he
had supposed. Not only because, in the hours when he most entirely
mistrusted her, he had rarely imagined such a culmination of evil, but
because, even when he did imagine that offence, it remained vague,
uncertain, was not clothed in the particular horror which had escaped with
the words "perhaps two or three times," was not armed with that specific
cruelty, as different from anything that he had known as a new malady by
which one is attacked for the first time. And yet this Odette, from whom
all this evil sprang, was no less dear to him, was, on the contrary, more
precious, as if, in proportion as his sufferings increased, there
increased at the same time the price of the sedative, of the antidote
which this woman alone possessed. He wished to pay her more attention, as
one attends to a disease which one discovers, suddenly, to have grown more
serious. He wished that the horrible thing which, she had told him, she
had done "two or three times" might be prevented from occurring again.
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