n style.

After numerous intrigues such as women are skillful in managing in the
interest of their vanity, and the tenacity and perfection of which
would lead you to believe that they have a third sex in their head,
this tale, entitled "The Lotus," appears in three installments in a
leading daily paper. It is signed Samuel Crux.

When Adolphe takes up the paper at breakfast, Caroline's heart beats
up in her very throat: she blushes, turns pale, looks away and stares
at the ceiling. When Adolphe's eyes settle upon the feuilleton, she
can bear it no longer: she gets up, goes out, comes back, having
replenished her stock of audacity, no one knows where.

"Is there a feuilleton this morning?" she asks with an air that she
thinks indifferent, but which would disturb a husband still jealous of
his wife.

"Yes, one by a beginner, Samuel Crux. The name is a disguise, clearly:
the tale is insignificant enough to drive an insect to despair, if he
could read: and vulgar, too: the style is muddy, but then it's--"

Caroline breathes again. "It's--" she suggests.

"It's incomprehensible," resumes Adolphe. "Somebody must have paid
Chodoreille five or six hundred francs to insert it; or else it's the
production of a blue-stocking in high society who has promised to
invite Madame Chodoreille to her house; or perhaps it's the work of a
woman in whom the editor is personally interested. Such a piece of
stupidity cannot be explained any other way. Imagine, Caroline, that
it's all about a little flower picked on the edge of a wood in a
sentimental walk, which a gentleman of the Werther school has sworn to
keep, which he has had framed, and which the lady claims again eleven
years after (the poor man has had time to change his lodgings three
times). It's quite new, about as old as Sterne or Gessner. What makes
me think it's a woman, is that the first literary idea of the whole
sex is to take vengeance on some one."

Adolphe might go on pulling "The Lotus" to pieces; Caroline's ears are
full of the tinkling of bells. She is like the woman who threw herself
over the Pont des Arts, and tried to find her way ten feet below the
level of the Seine.

ANOTHER STYLE. Caroline, in her paroxysms of jealousy, has discovered
a hiding place used by Adolphe, who, as he can't trust his wife, and
as he knows she opens his letters and rummages in his drawers, has
endeavored to save his correspondence with Hector from the hooked
fingers of the conj