Her husband submissively obeyed her, and added:
"He can only find fifty thousand francs. It will always make a nice instalment. Only, he won't mix this affair up with the Charonne one. He is but an intermediary, do you understand, my dear? The person who really lends the money demands enormous interest. He wants a note of hand for eighty thousand francs at six months' date."
And having crowned the height with a pointed cinder he crossed his hands over the tongs and looked fixedly at his wife.
"Eighty thousand francs!" she cried. "But that's robbery! Do you advise me to do anything so foolish?"
"No," he answered plainly. "But, if you are in absolute need of money, I won't forbid it."
He rose up as if he meant to leave the room. Renée, in a state of cruel indecision, looked at her husband, and at the bill which he laid upon the mantelshelf. She ended by taking her poor head in her hands and murmuring:
"Oh! these business matters! My head is splitting, this morning. Well, I shall sign this bill for eighty thousand francs. If I didn't, I should become altogether ill. I know myself, I should spend the day in frightful tortures—I prefer to be foolish at once. It will relieve me."
And she spoke of ringing to have a bill stamp fetched. But he insisted upon rendering her this service in person. No doubt he had the bill stamp in his pocket, for his absence scarcely lasted a couple of minutes. While she was writing at a little table which he had drawn to the fireside, he examined her and an astonished feeling of desire lighted up his eyes. It was very warm in the room, which was still full of the young woman's rising and the scent of her first toilet. Whilst speaking, she had let the folds of the dressing-gown in which she had swathed herself, fall down, and the eyes of her husband, who stood in front of her, glided over her bent head from amid the gold of her hair far down to the whiteness of her neck and bosom. He smiled with a singular air; this ardent fire which had burnt his face, this closed room, the heavy atmosphere of which was impregnated with a scent of love, this yellow hair and this white skin which tempted him with a kind of conjugal disdain, made him dreamy, enlarged the scope of the drama in which he had just played a scene, and prompted some secret voluptuous design in his brutal jobber's flesh.
When his wife held him out the bill, begging him to finish the affair for her, he took it, still looking at her.
"You are bewitchingly beautiful," he murmured.