for my acts, they're none of his business, no more his than anybody else's."
She spoke in a crisp, incisive tone.
"The devil;" said Durtal. "You certainly reduce the importance of the rôle of husband."
"I know that my ideas are not the ideas of the world I live in, and they appear not to be yours. In my first marriage they were a source of trouble and disaster—but I have an iron will and I bend the people who love me. In addition, I despise deceit, so when a few years after marriage I became smitten on a man I quite frankly told my husband and confessed my fault."
"Dare I ask you in what spirit he received this confidence?"
"He was so grieved that in one night his hair turned white. He could not bear what he called—wrongly, I think—my treason, and he killed himself."
"Ah!" said Durtal, dumbfounded by the placid and resolute air of this woman, "but suppose he had strangled you first?"
She shrugged her shoulders and picked a cat hair off her skirt.
"The result," he resumed after a silence, "being that you are now almost free, that your second husband tolerates—"
"Let us not discuss my second husband. He is an excellent man who deserves a better wife. I have absolutely no reason to speak of Chantelouve otherwise than with praise, and then—oh, let's talk of something else, for I have had sufficient botheration on this subject from my confessor, who interdicts me from the Holy Table."