“What, are you pouting?” asks Caroline, after a quarter of an hour’s observation of her husband’s countenance.
“No, I am meditating,” replied Adolphe.
“Oh, what an infernal temper you’ve got!” she returns, with a shrug of the shoulders. “Is it for what I said about your stomach, your shape and your digestion? Don’t you see that I was only paying you back for your vermilion? You’ll make me think that men are as vain as women. [Adolphe remains frigid.] It is really quite kind in you to take our qualities. [Profound silence.] I made a joke and you got angry [she looks at Adolphe], for you are angry. I am not like you: I cannot bear the idea of having given you pain! Nevertheless, it’s an idea that a man never would have had, that of attributing your impertinence to something wrong in your digestion. It’s not my Dolph, it’s his stomach that was bold enough to speak. I did not know you were a ventriloquist, that’s all.”
Caroline looks at Adolphe and smiles: Adolphe is as stiff as if he were glued.
“No, he won’t laugh! And, in your jargon, you call this having character. Oh, how much better we are!”
She goes and sits down in Adolphe’s lap, and Adolphe cannot help smiling. This smile, extracted as if by a steam engine, Caroline has been on the watch for, in order to make a weapon of it.
“Come, old fellow, confess that you are wrong,” she says. “Why pout? Dear me, I like you just as you are: in my eyes you are as slender as when I married you, and slenderer perhaps.”
“Caroline, when people get to deceive themselves in these little matters, where one makes concessions and the other does not get angry, do you know what it means?”
“What does it mean?” asks Caroline, alarmed at Adolphe’s dramatic attitude.
“That they love each other less.”