He cried out at this. He would not have it so. He had not been beside himself when he wrote her those ardent pages, he was in perfectly good faith, he loved her—
"You love me! Why, you didn't even know that those letters were from me. You loved an unknown, a chimera. Well, admitting that you are telling the truth, the chimera does not exist now, for here I am."
"You are mistaken. I knew perfectly that it was Mme. Chantelouve hiding behind the pseudonym of Mme. Maubel." And he half-explained to her, without, of course, letting her know of his doubts, how he had lifted her mask.
"Ah!" She reflected, blinking her troubled eyes. "At any rate," she said, again facing him squarely, "you could not have recognized me in the first letters, to which you re
sponded with cries of passion. Those cries were not addressed to me."
He contested this observation, and became entangled in the dates and happenings and in the sequence of the notes. She at length lost the thread of his remarks. The situation was so ridiculous that both were silent. Then she sat down and burst out laughing.
Her strident, shrill laugh, revealing magnificent, but short and pointed teeth, in a mocking mouth, vexed him.
"She has been playing with me," he said to himself, and dissatisfied with the turn the conversation had taken, and furious at seeing this woman so calm, so different from her burning letters, he asked, in a tone of irritation, "Am I to know why you laugh?"
"Pardon me. It's a trick my nerves play on me, sometimes in public places. But never mind. Let us be reasonable and talk things over. You tell me you love me—"
"And I mean it."