"No, not exactly."
Then came a shower of petty criticisms; someone's tie was not straight, another had too long a nose, another drawled, and then, "the fellow who played Wagner!"
"You are not kind," said her husband with a lame attempt to defend his friends.
"Yes! and the friends you trust in! You should only have heard and seen the words and looks which I heard and saw. They are false to you."
He continued to smoke and kept silence, but he thought how low he had sunk to deny his old and tried friends; how despicable it was to plead for forgiveness with his eyes for the performance of Wagner. His thoughts ran parallel with her loud chatter, and he spoke them in silence.
"You despise my friends because they do not court their friend's wife, do not pay her little compliments on her figure and dress; and you hate them because you feel how my strength grows in the circle of their sympathies for me. You hate them as you hate me, and would hate anyone else who was your husband."
She must have felt the effect of these thoughts, for her volubility slackened, and when he cast a glance at her, she seemed to have shrunk together. Immediately afterwards she rose, on the pretext that she felt freezing. As a matter of fact, she was trembling and had red flames on her cheeks.
That night he observed for the first time that he had at his side an ugly old woman who had enamelled her face with bright cosmetics and plaited her hair like a peasant woman.
She did not bother herself to appear at her best before him but was already free and easy and cynical enough to make herself repugnant by disclosing the unbeautiful secrets of the toilet.
Then for a moment he was released from his enchantment, and continued to think of flight till sleep had pity on him.