, 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 inches thick!
and my gentleman is absent seven hours a day! That's what a country seat
means!"

"Listen to me, Caroline."

"I wouldn't so much mind, if you would only confess what you did to-day.
You don't know me yet: come, tell me, I won't scold you. I pardon you
beforehand for all that you've done."

Adolphe, who knows the consequences of a confession too well to make one
to his wife, replies--"Well, I'll tell you."

"That's a good fellow--I shall love you better."

"I w