I shan’t struggle. But fear touched me all at once. Could it conceivably be that Maurice does prefer her to me? The idea had never occurred to me. I know that I possess—all right, let’s leave that word authenticity out of it: maybe it is a trifle priggish—a certain quality that she does not. “You have real quality, my dear,” my father used to say to me, proudly. And Maurice too, in other words. It is this quality that I value above anything else in people—in Maurice, and in Isabelle: and Maurice is like me. No. It is impossible that he should prefer someone as bogus as Noëllie to me. She is “cheap,” as they say in English. But it worries me that he should accept in her so many things that I consider unacceptable. For the first time I see that a gap has come into being between us.