“Oh yes! The fruiterer and his wife. Well, my dear fellow, they never once touched one another! Not the least bit! She was very keen on it, you understand, but he, the ninny, didn’t know it. He was so green that he thought her a stick, and so he went elsewhere and took up with streetwalkers, who treated him to all sorts of nastiness, while she, on her part, made up for it beautifully with fellows who were a lot slyer than her greenhorn of a husband. And things always turn out that way through people not understanding one another. I know it, I do!”
Muffat was growing pale. At last he was beginning to understand her allusions, and he wanted to make her keep silence. But she was in full swing.
“No, hold your tongue, will you? If you weren’t brutes you would be as nice with your wives as you are with us, and if your wives weren’t geese they would take as much pains to keep you as we do to get you. That’s the way to behave. Yes, my duck, you can put that in your pipe and smoke it.”
“Do not talk of honest women,” he said in a hard voice. “You do not know them.”
At that Nana rose to her knees.
“I don’t know them! Why, they aren’t even clean, your honest women aren’t! They aren’t even clean! I defy you to find me one who would dare show herself as I am doing. Oh, you make me laugh with your honest women. Don’t drive me to it; don’t oblige me to tell you things I may regret afterward.”
The count, by way of answer, mumbled something insulting. Nana became quite pale in her turn. For some seconds she looked at him without speaking. Then in her decisive way:
“What would you do if your wife were deceiving you?”
He made a threatening gesture.
“Well, and if I were to?”