rovidence, whose office it is to put a little
more color in one place than another, not to me, who loves you, who
desires you to be perfect, and who merely says to you, take care!"

"You love me too much, then, for you've been trying, for some time past,
to find disagreeable things to say to me. You want to run me down under
the pretext of making me perfect--people said I _was_ perfect, five
years ago."

"I think you are better than perfect, you are stunning!"

"With too much vermilion?"

Adolphe, who sees the atmosphere of the north pole upon his wife's face,
sits down upon a chair by her side. Caroline, unable decently to go
away, gives her gown a sort of flip on one side, as if to produce a
separation. This motion is performed by some women with a provoking
impertinence: but it has two significations; it is, as whist players
would say, either a signal _for trumps_ or a _renounce_. At this time,
Caroline renounces.

"What is the matter?" says Adolphe.

"Will you have a glass of sugar and water?" asks Caroline, busying
herself about your health, and assuming the part of a servant.

"What for?"

"You are not amiable while digesting, you must be in pain. Perhaps you
would like a drop of brandy in your sugar and water? The doctor spoke of
it as an excellent remedy."

"How anxious you are about my stomach!"

"It's a centre, it communicates with the other organs, it will act upon
your heart, and through that perhaps upon your tongue."

Adolphe gets up and walks about without saying a word, but he reflects
upon the acuteness which his wife is acquiring: he sees her daily
gaining in strength and in acrimony: she is getting to display an art
in vexation and a military capacity for disputation which reminds him of
Charles XII and the Russians. Caroline, during this time, is busy with
an alarming piece of mimicry: she looks as if she were going to faint.

"Are you sick?" asks Adolphe, attacked in his generosity, the place
where women always have us.

"It makes me sick at my stomach, after dinner, to see a man going back
and forth so, like the pendulum of a clock. But it's just like you: you
are always in a fuss about something. You are a queer set: all men are
more or less cracked."

Adolphe sits down by the fire opposite to his wife, and remains there
pensive: marriage appears to him like an immense dreary plain, with its
crop of nettles and mullen stalks.

"What, are you pouting?" asks Caroline, after a quar