r, to emphasize her decision, she lighted a fresh cigarette from the
one she had just finished, and while the Nabob enveloped his "darling
little wife" in apologies and prayers and supplications, promising her a
diadem of pearls a hundred times more beautiful than hers if she would
come, she watched the heady smoke float up to the painted ceiling and
wrapped herself in it as in imperturbable tranquillity. Finally, in face
of that persistent refusal, that silence, that forehead upon which he
detected the barrier of unconquerable obstinacy, Jansoulet gave rein to
his wrath and drew himself up to his full height.

"Very good," said he, "I say you shall."

He turned to the negresses:

"Dress your mistress, at once."

And the boor that he really was, the son of the Southern junk-dealer
coming to the surface in that crisis, which moved him to the depths of
his being, he threw back the bedclothes with a brutal, contemptuous
gesture, tossing the innumerable gewgaws they held to the floor, and
forcing the half-naked Levantine to jump to her feet with a promptitude
most remarkable in that bulky personage. She roared under the outrage,
gathered the folds of her tunic about her misshapen bust, fixed her
little cap crosswise over her falling hair, and began to blackguard her
husband.

"Never, you hear me, never--you shall never drag me to that--"

Filth poured from her heavy lips as from the mouth of a drain. Jansoulet
might well have believed that he was in one of the frightful dens along
the water front in Marseille, listening to a quarrel between a
prostitute and a _nervi_, or looking on at some open-air fracas between
Genoese, Maltese and Provencal women gleaning on the quay around bags of
grain in process of unloading, and reviling each other at full speed in
eddies of golden dust. She was the typical seaport Levantine, the
spoiled, neglected child, who from her terrace, or from her gondola, in
the evening, has heard sailors cursing one another in all the languages
of the Latin seas, and has remembered everything. The wretched man
stared at her, horrified and dismayed at what she compelled him to hear,
at her grotesque figure, foaming at the mouth and sputtering:

"No, I won't go--no, I won't go!"

And she was the mother of his children, an Afchin!

Suddenly, at the thought that his fate was in that woman's hands, that
she had only to put on a dress to save him, and that time was flying,
that it would soon be too late