Here Adolphe tries, by looking fixedly at Caroline, to arrest the torrent of words. Caroline, like a horse who has just been touched up by the lash, starts off anew, and with the animation of one of Rossini’s codas:
“Yes, it’s a very neat idea, to put your wife out in the country so that you may spend the day as you like at Paris. So this is the cause of your passion for a country house! Snipe that I was, to be caught in the trap! You are right, sir, a villa is very convenient: it serves two objects. But the wife can get along with it as well as the husband. You may take Paris and its hacks! I’ll take the woods and their shady groves! Yes, Adolphe, I am really satisfied, so let’s say no more about it.”
Adolphe listens to sarcasm for an hour by the clock.
“Have you done, dear?” he asks, profiting by an instant in which she tosses her head after a pointed interrogation.
Then Caroline concludes thus: “I’ve had enough of the villa, and I’ll never set foot in it again. But I know what will happen: you’ll keep it, probably, and leave me in Paris. Well, at Paris, I can at least amuse myself, while you go with Madame de Fischtaminel to the woods. What is a Villa Adolphini where you get nauseated if you go six times round the lawn? where they’ve planted chair-legs and broom-sticks on the pretext of producing shade? It’s like a furnace: the walls are six inches thick! and my gentleman is absent seven hours a day! That’s what a country seat means!”
“Listen to me, Caroline.”
“I wouldn’t so much mind, if you would only confess what you did to-day. You don’t know me yet: come, tell me, I won’t scold you. I pardon you beforehand for all that you’ve done.”
Adolphe, who knows the consequences of a confession too well to make one to his wife, replies—“Well, I’ll tell you.”
“That’s a good fellow—I shall love you better.”
“I was three hours—”