“But you said just now,” she exclaims, at the moment when Adolphe is getting into a snarl, “that you had paid seven francs for cabs, and you now talk of a hack!  You took it by the hour, I suppose?  Did you do your business in a hack?” she asks, railingly.

“Why should hacks be interdicted?” inquires Adolphe, resuming his narrative.

“Haven’t you been to Madame de Fischtaminel’s?” she asks in the middle of an exceedingly involved explanation, insolently taking the words out of your mouth.

“Why should I have been there?”

“It would have given me pleasure:  I wanted to know whether her parlor is done.”

“It is.”

“Ah! then you have been there?”

“No, her upholsterer told me.”

“Do you know her upholsterer?”

“Yes.”

“Who is it?”

“Braschon.”

“So you met the upholsterer?”

“Yes.”

“You said you only went in carriages.”

“Yes, my dear, but to get carriages, you have to go and—­”

“Pooh!  I dare say Braschon was in the carriage, or the parlor was—­one or the other is equally probable.”

“You won’t listen,” exclaims Adolphe, who thinks that a long story will lull Caroline’s suspicions.

“I’ve listened too much already.  You’ve been lying for the last hour, worse than a drummer.”

“Well, I’ll say nothing more.”

“I know enough.  I know all I wanted to know.  You say you’ve seen lawyers, notaries, bankers:  now you haven’t seen one of them!  Suppose I were to go to-morrow to see Madame de Fischtaminel, do you know what she would say?”

Here, Caroline watches Adolphe closely:  but Adolphe affects a delusive calmness, in the middle of which Caroline throws out her line to fish up a clue.

“Why, she would say that she had had the pleasure of seeing you!  How wretched we poor creatures are!  We never know what you are doing:  here we are stuck, chained at home, while you are off at your business!  Fine business, truly!  If I were in your place, I would invent business a little bit better put together than yours!  Ah, you set us a worthy example!  They say women are perverse.  Who perverted them?”

Here Adolphe tries, by looking fixedly at Caroline, to arrest the torrent of words.  Caroline, like a horse who has just been touched up by the lash, starts off anew, and with the animation of one of Rossini’s codas: 

“Yes, it’s a very neat idea, to put your wife out in the country so that you may spend the day as you like at Paris.  So this is the cause of your passion for a country house!  Snipe that I was, to be caught in the trap!  You are right, sir, a villa is very convenient:  it serves two objects.  But the wife can get along with it as well as the husband.  You may take Paris and its hacks!  I’ll take the woods and their shady groves!  Yes, Adolphe, I am really satisfied, so let’s say no more about it.”