ace."

At last, Caroline heard the crack of a postilion's whip, the well-known
rumbling of a traveling carriage, the racket made by the hoofs of
post-horses, and the jingling of their bells! Oh, she could doubt no
longer, the bells made her burst forth, as thus:

"The door! Open the door! 'Tis he, my husband! Will you never go to the
door!" And the pious woman stamped her foot and broke the bell-rope.

"Why, madame," said Justine, with the vivacity of a servant doing her
duty, "it's some people going away."

"Upon my word," replied Caroline, half ashamed, to herself, "I will
never let Adolphe go traveling again without me."

A Marseilles poet--it is not known whether it was Mery or
Barthelemy--acknowledged that if his best fried did not arrive
punctually at the dinner hour, he waited patiently five minutes: at the
tenth minute, he felt a desire to throw the napkin in his face: at the
twelfth he hoped some great calamity would befall him: at the fifteenth,
he would not be able to restrain himself from stabbing him several times
with a dirk.

All women, when expecting somebody, are Marseilles poets, if, indeed,
we may compare the vulgar throes of hunger to the sublime Canticle of
canticles of a pious wife, who is hoping for the joys of a husband's
first glance after a three months' absence. Let all those who love and
who have met again after an absence ten thousand times accursed, be good
enough to recall their first glance: it says so many things that the
lovers, if in the presence of a third party, are fain to lower their
eyes! This poem, in which every man is as great as Homer, in which
he seems a god to the woman who loves him, is, for a pious, thin and
pimpled lady, all the more immense, from the fact that she has not, like
Madame de Fischtaminel, the resource of having several copies of it. In
her case, her husband is all she's got!

So you will not be surprised to learn that Caroline missed every mass
and had no breakfast. This hunger and thirst for Adolphe gave her a
violent cramp in the stomach. She did not think of religion once during
the hours of mass, nor during those of vespers. She was not comfortable
when she sat, and she was very uncomfortable when she stood: Justine
advised her to go to bed. Caroline, quite overcome, retired at about
half past five in the evening, after having taken a light soup: but she
ordered a dainty supper at ten.

"I shall doubtless sup with my husband," she said.

This