t elsewhere and took up with
streetwalkers, who treated him to all sorts of nastiness, while she, on
her part, made up for it beautifully with fellows who were a lot slyer
than her greenhorn of a husband. And things always turn out that way
through people not understanding one another. I know it, I do!"

Muffat was growing pale. At last he was beginning to understand her
allusions, and he wanted to make her keep silence. But she was in full
swing.

"No, hold your tongue, will you? If you weren't brutes you would be as
nice with your wives as you are with us, and if your wives weren't geese
they would take as much pains to keep you as we do to get you. That's
the way to behave. Yes, my duck, you can put that in your pipe and smoke
it."

"Do not talk of honest women," he said in a hard voice. "You do not know
them."

At that Nana rose to her knees.

"I don't know them! Why, they aren't even clean, your honest women
aren't! They aren't even clean! I defy you to find me one who would
dare show herself as I am doing. Oh, you make me laugh with your honest
women. Don't drive me to it; don't oblige me to tell you things I may
regret afterward."

The count, by way of answer, mumbled something insulting. Nana became
quite pale in her turn. For some seconds she looked at him without
speaking. Then in her decisive way:

"What would you do if your wife were deceiving you?"

He made a threatening gesture.

"Well, and if I were to?"

"Oh, you," he muttered with a shrug of his shoulders.

Nana was certainly not spiteful. Since the beginning of the conversation
she had been strongly tempted to throw his cuckold's reputation in his
teeth, but she had resisted. She would have liked to confess him quietly
on the subject, but he had begun to exasperate her at last. The matter
ought to stop now.

"Well, then, my dearie," she continued, "I don't know what you're
getting at with me. For two hours past you've been worrying my life out.
Now do just go and find your wife, for she's at it with Fauchery. Yes,
it's quite correct; they're in the Rue Taitbout, at the corner of the
Rue de Provence. You see, I'm giving you the address."

Then triumphantly, as she saw Muffat stagger to his feet like an ox
under the hammer:

"If honest women must meddle in our affairs and take our sweethearts
from us--Oh, you bet they're a nice lot, those honest women!"

But she was unable to proceed. With a terrible push he had cast her full
length