lphe tries to hide his vexation at this torrent of words, which
begins when they are still half way from home, and has no sea to empty
into. When Caroline is in her room, she goes on in the same way.

"You see that if reasons could restore my health or prevent me from
desiring a kind of exercise pointed out by nature herself, I should not
be in want of reasons, and that I know all the reasons that there are,
and that I went over with the reasons before I spoke to you."

This, ladies, may with the more truth be called the prologue to
the conjugal drama, from the fact that it is vigorously delivered,
embellished with a commentary of gestures, ornamented with glances
and all the other vignettes with which you usually illustrate such
masterpieces.

Caroline, when she has once planted in Adolphe's heart the apprehension
of a scene of constantly reiterated demands, feels her hatred for his
control largely increase. Madame pouts, and she pouts so fiercely,
that Adolphe is forced to notice it, on pain of very disagreeable
consequences, for all is over, be sure of that, between two beings
married by the mayor, or even at Gretna Green, when one of them no
longer notices the sulkings of the other.

Axiom.--A sulk that has struck in is a deadly poison.

It was to prevent this suicide of love that our ingenious France
invented boudoirs. Women could not well have Virgil's willows in the
economy of our modern dwellings. On the downfall of oratories, these
little cubbies become boudoirs.

This conjugal drama has three acts. The act of the prologue is already
played. Then comes the act of false coquetry: one of those in which
French women have the most success.

Adolphe is walking about the room, divesting himself of his apparel, and
the man thus engaged, divests himself of his strength as well as of his
clothing. To every man of forty, this axiom will appear profoundly just:

Axiom.--The ideas of a man who has taken his boots and his suspenders
off, are no longer those of a man who is still sporting these two
tyrants of the mind.

Take notice that this is only an axiom in wedded life. In morals, it is
what we call a relative theorem.

Caroline watches, like a jockey on the race course, the moment when
she can distance her adversary. She makes her preparations to be
irresistibly fascinating to Adolphe.

Women possess a power of mimicking pudicity, a knowledge of secrets
which might be those of a frightened dove, a p