She turned to him:  “I say, you worry me.  You are a coward, like all other men are!  You are frightened of that poor creature!” He immediately jumped up and said, furiously:  “I should like to know what he does, and why you are so set against him?  Does he make you unhappy?  Does he beat you?  Does he deceive you and go with another woman?  No, it is really too bad to make him suffer, merely because he is too kind, and to hate him merely because you are unfaithful to him.”  She went up to Limousin, and looking him full in the face, she said:  “And you reproach me with deceiving him?  You?  You?  What a filthy heart you must have?”

He felt rather ashamed, and tried to defend himself:  “I am not reproaching you, my dear; I am only asking you to treat your husband gently, because we both of us require him to trust us.  I think that you ought to see that.”

They were close together; he, tall, dark, with long whiskers, and the rather vulgar manners of a good-looking man, who is very well satisfied with himself; she, small, fair and pink, a little Parisian, half shopkeeper, half one of those of easy virtue, born behind a shop, brought up at its door to entice customers by her looks, and married, accidentally, in consequence to a simple, unsophisticated man, who saw her outside the door every morning when he went out, and every evening when he came home.

“But do you not understand, you great booby,” she said, “that I hate him just because he married me, because he bought me; in fact, because everything that he says and does, everything that he thinks, acts on my nerves?  He exasperates me every moment by his stupidity, which you call his kindness, by his dullness, which you call his confidence, and then, above all, because he is my husband, instead of you!  I feel him between us, although he does not interfere with us much.  And then?... and then?...  No, it is, after all, too idiotic of him not to guess anything!  I wish he would at any rate be a little jealous.  There are moments when I feel inclined to say to him:  ’Do you not see, you stupid creature, that Paul is my lover?’”

Limousin began to laugh:  “Meanwhile, it would be a good thing if you were to keep quiet, and not disturb our life.”  “Oh!  I shall not disturb it, you may be sure!  There is nothing to fear, with such a fool.  No; but it is quite incomprehensible that you cannot understand how hateful he is to me, how he irritates me.  You always seem to like him, and you shake hands with him cordially.  Men are very surprising at times.”

“One must know how to dissimulate, my dear.”  “It is no question of dissimulation, but of feeling.  One might think that, when you men deceive another, you liked him all the more on that account, while we women hate the man from the moment that we have betrayed him.”  “I do not see why one should hate an excellent fellow, because one has his wife.”  “You do not see it?...  You do not see it?...  You all of you are wanting in that fineness of feeling!  However, that is one of those things which one feels, and which one cannot express.  And then, moreover, one ought not....  No, you would not understand; it is quite useless.  You men have no delicacy of feeling.”