But she did enjoy men’s gallantry and loved seeing desire, unreciprocated though it might be, flash into their eyes. She enjoyed the bold advances, the declarations hurriedly murmured in her ear as she withdrew to the salon after an exquisite dinner. She loved hearing words stammered so softly they had sometimes to be guessed at, but her heart was unmoved. Unconsciously, however, though she herself was unaroused, these encounters tickled her vanity and sparked off in her a little warm contentment. Her face would light up and a smile would play on her lips. She found it thrilling to be, as every woman should be, the object of adoration.

She loved a little firelight tête-à-tête in the drawing room before the lamps were lit, when the man, stammering and trembling, would become more insistent and fall on his knees. For her it was a new and exquisite pleasure to feel a passion which she did not share, and through the movements of her head and her lips, to convey refusal, to draw away her hands, to rise and ring for the lamps and see the man, furious and embarrassed, rise off his knees before the servant arrived.

She had a cold little laugh at which words of burning passion would freeze on her admirer’s lips; harsh words which acted like a bucket of icy water dashed on ardent protestations of love. Her glacial tones would drive a man who loved her madly to think instead of suicide.

She had two particularly keen admirers who were as different as chalk and cheese. One, Monsieur Paul Péronel, was tall, bold and gallant. He was a wealthy, urbane young man who knew how to bide his time. The other, Monsieur d’Avancelle, trembled when she was near but otherwise hardly dared allow her to guess his feelings. He followed her like a shadow and expressed his desperate desire for her through beseeching glances and by his constant presence. The first she nicknamed ‘Captain Thunder’ and the other ‘Little Lamb’. Never out of sight, and treated by her like a servant, the latter became gradually a kind of slave to her.