“What is the matter?” says Adolphe.

“Will you have a glass of sugar and water?” asks Caroline, busying herself about your health, and assuming the part of a servant.

“What for?”

“You are not amiable while digesting, you must be in pain.  Perhaps you would like a drop of brandy in your sugar and water?  The doctor spoke of it as an excellent remedy.”

“How anxious you are about my stomach!”

“It’s a centre, it communicates with the other organs, it will act upon your heart, and through that perhaps upon your tongue.”

Adolphe gets up and walks about without saying a word, but he reflects upon the acuteness which his wife is acquiring:  he sees her daily gaining in strength and in acrimony:  she is getting to display an art in vexation and a military capacity for disputation which reminds him of Charles XII and the Russians.  Caroline, during this time, is busy with an alarming piece of mimicry:  she looks as if she were going to faint.

“Are you sick?” asks Adolphe, attacked in his generosity, the place where women always have us.

“It makes me sick at my stomach, after dinner, to see a man going back and forth so, like the pendulum of a clock.  But it’s just like you:  you are always in a fuss about something.  You are a queer set:  all men are more or less cracked.”

Adolphe sits down by the fire opposite to his wife, and remains there pensive:  marriage appears to him like an immense dreary plain, with its crop of nettles and mullen stalks.

“What, are you pouting?” asks Caroline, after a quarter of an hour’s observation of her husband’s countenance.

“No, I am meditating,” replied Adolphe.

“Oh, what an infernal temper you’ve got!” she returns, with a shrug of the shoulders.  “Is it for what I said about your stomach, your shape and your digestion?  Don’t you see that I was only paying you back for your vermilion?  You’ll make me think that men are as vain as women. [Adolphe remains frigid.] It is really quite kind in you to take our qualities. [Profound silence.] I made a joke and you got angry [she looks at Adolphe], for you are angry.  I am not like you:  I cannot bear the idea of having given you pain!  Nevertheless, it’s an idea that a man never would have had, that of attributing your impertinence to something wrong in your digestion.  It’s not my Dolph, it’s his stomach that was bold enough to speak.  I did not know you were a ventriloquist, that’s all.”

Caroline looks at Adolphe and smiles:  Adolphe is as stiff as if he were glued.

“No, he won’t laugh!  And, in your jargon, you call this having character.  Oh, how much better we are!”

She goes and sits down in Adolphe’s lap, and Adolphe cannot help smiling.  This smile, extracted as if by a steam engine, Caroline has been on the watch for, in order to make a weapon of it.

“Come, old fellow, confess that you are wrong,” she says.  “Why pout?  Dear me, I like you just as you are:  in my eyes you are as slender as when I married you, and slenderer perhaps.”