“You old profligate,” cried Lisbeth, “you have not even asked me how your children are?  What are you going to do for Adeline?  I, at any rate, will take her my savings to-morrow.”

“You owe your wife white bread to eat at least,” said Madame Marneffe, smiling.

The Baron, without taking offence at Lisbeth’s tone, as despotic as Josepha’s, got out of the room, only too glad to escape so importunate a question.

The door bolted once more, the Brazilian came out of the dressing-closet, where he had been waiting, and he appeared with his eyes full of tears, in a really pitiable condition.  Montes had heard everything.

“Henri, you must have ceased to love me, I know it!” said Madame Marneffe, hiding her face in her handkerchief and bursting into tears.

It was the outcry of real affection.  The cry of a woman’s despair is so convincing that it wins the forgiveness that lurks at the bottom of every lover’s heart—­when she is young and pretty, and wears a gown so low that she could slip out at the top and stand in the garb of Eve.

“But why, if you love me, do you not leave everything for my sake?” asked the Brazilian.

This South American born, being logical, as men are who have lived the life of nature, at once resumed the conversation at the point where it had been broken off, putting his arm round Valerie’s waist.

“Why?” she repeated, gazing up at Henri, whom she subjugated at once by a look charged with passion, “why, my dear boy, I am married; we are in Paris, not in the savannah, the pampas, the backwoods of America.—­My dear Henri, my first and only love, listen to me.  That husband of mine, a second clerk in the War Office, is bent on being a head-clerk and officer of the Legion of Honor; can I help his being ambitious?  Now for the very reason that made him leave us our liberty —­nearly four years ago, do you remember, you bad boy?—­he now abandons me to Monsieur Hulot.  I cannot get rid of that dreadful official, who snorts like a grampus, who has fins in his nostrils, who is sixty-three years old, and who had grown ten years older by dint of trying to be young; who is so odious to me that the very day when Marneffe is promoted, and gets his Cross of the Legion of Honor——­”

“How much more will your husband get then?”

“A thousand crowns.”

“I will pay him as much in an annuity,” said Baron Montes.  “We will leave Paris and go——­”

“Where?” said Valerie, with one of the pretty sneers by which a woman makes fun of a man she is sure of.  “Paris is the only place where we can live happy.  I care too much for your love to risk seeing it die out in a tete-a-tete in the wilderness.  Listen, Henri, you are the only man I care for in the whole world.  Write that down clearly in your tiger’s brain.”

For women, when they have made a sheep of a man, always tell him that he is a lion with a will of iron.