ge, 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."

Adolphe listens to sarcasm for an hour by the clock.

"Have you done, dear?" he asks, profiting by an instant in which she
tosses her head after a pointed interrogation.

Then Caroline concludes thus: "I've had enough of the villa, and I'll
never set foot in it again. But I know what will happen: you'll keep
it, probably, and leave me in Paris. Well, at Paris, I can at least
amuse myself, while you go with Madame de Fischtaminel to the woods.
What is a _Villa Adolphini_ where you get nauseated if you go six
times round the lawn? where they've planted chair-legs and
broom-sticks on the pretext of producing shade? It's like a furnace:
the walls are six i