“We are happy, my dear [to a lady], when we love each other no longer: it’s then that we learn how to make ourselves beloved,” and she looks at Ferdinand.
In short, the last quarrel never comes to an end, and from this fact flows the following axiom:
Axiom.—Putting yourself in the wrong with your lawful wife, is solving the problem of Perpetual Motion.
A SIGNAL FAILURE.
Women, and especially married women, stick ideas into their brain-pan precisely as they stick pins into a pincushion, and the devil himself, —do you mind?—could not get them out: they reserve to themselves the exclusive right of sticking them in, pulling them out, and sticking them in again.
Caroline is riding home one evening from Madame Foullepointe’s in a violent state of jealousy and ambition.
Madame Foullepointe, the lioness—but this word requires an explanation. It is a fashionable neologism, and gives expression to certain rather meagre ideas relative to our present society: you must use it, if you want to describe a woman who is all the rage. This lioness rides on horseback every day, and Caroline has taken it into her head to learn to ride also.
Observe that in this conjugal phase, Adolphe and Caroline are in the season which we have denominated A Household Revolution, and that they have had two or three Last Quarrels.
“Adolphe,” she says, “do you want to do me a favor?”
“Of course.”