r?"

He admitted it quietly, and added: "Did not you know it?"

She exclaimed, standing before him, furious and indignant:

"You are going to marry Susan Walter? That is too much of a good thing.
For three months you have been humbugging in order to hide that from me.
Everyone knew it but me. It was my husband who told me of it."

Du Roy began to laugh, though somewhat confused all the same; and having
placed his hat on a corner of the mantel-shelf, sat down in an armchair.
She looked at him straight in the face, and said, in a low and irritated
tone: "Ever since you left your wife you have been preparing this move,
and you only kept me on as a mistress to fill up the interim nicely.
What a rascal you are!"

He asked: "Why so? I had a wife who deceived me. I caught her, I
obtained a divorce, and I am going to marry another. What could be
simpler?"

She murmured, quivering: "Oh! how cunning and dangerous you are."

He began to smile again. "By Jove! Simpletons and fools are always
someone's dupes."

But she continued to follow out her idea: "I ought to have divined your
nature from the beginning. But no, I could not believe that you could be
such a blackguard as that."

He assumed an air of dignity, saying: "I beg of you to pay attention to
the words you are making use of."

His indignation revolted her. "What? You want me to put on gloves to
talk to you now. You have behaved towards me like a vagabond ever since
I have known you, and you want to make out that I am not to tell you so.
You deceive everyone; you take advantage of everyone; you filch money
and enjoyment wherever you can, and you want me to treat you as an
honest man!"

He rose, and with quivering lip, said: "Be quiet, or I will turn you out
of here."

She stammered: "Turn me out of here; turn me out of here! You will turn
me out of here--you--you?" She could not speak for a moment for choking
with anger, and then suddenly, as though the door of her wrath had been

burst open, she broke out with: "Turn me out of here? You forget, then,
that it is I who have paid for these rooms from the beginning. Ah, yes,
you have certainly taken them on from time to time. But who first took
them? I did. Who kept them on? I did. And you want to turn me out of
here. Hold your tongue, you good-for-nothing fellow. Do you think I
don't know you robbed Madeleine of half Vaudrec's money? Do you think I
don't know how you slept with Susan to oblige her to marry you