In the beginning he had given his wife the greater part of the money that he received weekly for his household expenses.  Then he began to keep back more and more and finally he carried the whole of it into the places where the need of buying flatterers by treating them had followed him more faithfully than had the respect of the town.  The experience he had had with the “important” people had not converted him.  His wife had been obliged to get on with less and less.  Old Valentine saw her distress, and from now on the house money went through his, instead of her husband’s, hands.  Finally Valentine became her treasurer, and never gave her more than she needed at the moment because money was no longer safe from her husband in her hands.

She used what time she had from her housekeeping and her children in doing different pieces of work which Valentine, as her agent, sold for her.  The money that she thus received she used partly—­she herself would rather go hungry even though she could not see her children do so—­to adorn the living-room with all kinds of things that she knew that Apollonius loved.  And yet she knew that Apollonius never came in there, that he never saw it.  But then, she would not have done it if she had known that he would see it.  Her husband saw it as often as he came into the room.  Nothing escaped his eyes that might act as an excuse for his anger and his hatred.  Then he began to abuse Apollonius, and in such terms as if he too must now show how much it is possible to acquire of another person’s manner.

If the children were present it was his wife’s first care to send them away.  They must not witness his roughness and learn to despise their father—­not for his sake but for their own.  He did not betray how glad he was to be rid of the “spies.”  He feared that the children would complain of him to Apollonius.  He did not think that his wife would complain herself, although he assumed that she and Apollonius met each other.  Everything that he saw in the room was to him a fresh proof of his shame.  How could he believe that it was for any other purpose than to be noticed by Apollonius?  Then, when she told him that he might abuse her, only not Apollonius, the keen eye of jealousy showed him what pleasure she took in suffering for Apollonius.  He reproached her with it, and she did not deny it.  She said to him:  “Because he suffers for me and for my children.  He gives what he has been at great pains to save to take the place of the weekly sum of which the father has robbed his children.”

“And he tells you that?  He tells you that!” said the man, laughing with savage joy at having trapped her into a confession that she met him.

“Not he,” returned his wife angrily, because the man she despised was judging Apollonius by himself.  “Old Valentine told me.”  She went on to tell him that Valentine had sold as his own the watch that Apollonius had brought with him from Cologne.  Apollonius had forbidden him to tell her.