The invalid shook his head.
"Oh! go on! You were young once, you had your fling, there is some love-child of yours somewhere—cold, and starving, and homeless. . . . What monsters men are! Their love doesn't last only for a day, and then in a jiffy they forget, they don't so much as think of the child at the breast for months. . . . Poor women!"
"But no one has ever loved me except Schmucke and my mother," poor Pons broke in sadly.
"Oh! come, you aren't no saint! You were young in your time, and a fine-looking young fellow you must have been at twenty. I should have fallen in love with you myself, so nice as you are—"
"I always was as ugly as a toad," Pons put in desperately.
"You say that because you are modest; nobody can't say that you aren't modest."
"My dear Mme. Cibot, no, I tell you. I always was ugly, and I never was loved in my life."
"You, indeed!" cried the portress. "You want to make me believe at this time of day that you are as innocent as a young maid at your time of life. Tell that to your granny! A musician at a theatre too! Why, if a woman told me that, I wouldn't believe her."
"Montame Zipod, you irritate him!" cried Schmucke, seeing that Pons was writhing under the bedclothes.
"You hold your tongue too! You are a pair of old libertines. If you were ugly, it don't make no difference; there was never so ugly a saucepan-lid but it found a pot to match, as the saying is. There is Cibot, he got one of the handsomest oyster-women in Paris to fall in love with him, and you are infinitely better looking than him! You are a nice pair, you are! Come, now, you have sown your wild oats, and God will punish you for deserting your children, like Abraham—"