For some time past Count Muffat had appeared suspicious, and one morning, with considerable show of feeling, he laid before Nana an anonymous letter, where in the very first sentences she read that she was accused of deceiving the count with Vandeuvres and the young Hugons.
“It’s false! It’s false!” she loudly exclaimed in accents of extraordinary candor.
“You swear?” asked Muffat, already willing to be comforted.
“I’ll swear by whatever you like—yes, by the head of my child!”
But the letter was long. Soon her connection with Satin was described in the broadest and most ignoble terms. When she had done reading she smiled.
“Now I know who it comes from,” she remarked simply.
And as Muffat wanted her denial to the charges therein contained, she resumed quietly enough:
“That’s a matter which doesn’t concern you, dear old pet. How can it hurt you?”
She did not deny anything. He used some horrified expressions. Thereupon she shrugged her shoulders. Where had he been all this time? Why, it was done everywhere! And she mentioned her friends and swore that fashionable ladies went in for it. In fact, to hear her speak, nothing could be commoner or more natural. But a lie was a lie, and so a moment ago he had seen how angry she grew in the matter of Vandeuvres and the young Hugons! Oh, if that had been true he would have been justified in throttling her! But what was the good of lying to him about a matter of no consequence? And with that she repeated her previous expression:
“Come now, how can it hurt you?”