“Very well! very well!” said Emma. “Good morning, Madame Rollet,” and she went out, wiping her shoes at the door.
The good woman accompanied her to the end of the garden, talking all the time of the trouble she had getting up of nights.
“I’m that worn out sometimes as I drop asleep on my chair. I’m sure you might at least give me just a pound of ground coffee; that’d last me a month, and I’d take it of a morning with some milk.”
After having submitted to her thanks, Madam Bovary left. She had gone a little way down the path when, at the sound of wooden shoes, she turned round. It was the nurse.
“What is it?”
Then the peasant woman, taking her aside behind an elm tree, began talking to her of her husband, who with his trade and six francs a year that the captain—
“Oh, be quick!” said Emma.
“Well,” the nurse went on, heaving sighs between each word, “I’m afraid he’ll be put out seeing me have coffee alone, you know men—”
“But you are to have some,” Emma repeated; “I will give you some. You bother me!”
“Oh, dear! my poor, dear lady! you see in consequence of his wounds he has terrible cramps in the chest. He even says that cider weakens him.”