“Yes, that sort of talk is all very well,” replied Melior, fretfully. “But I do think that at a time when I have every right to expect particular attention and care, you might at least have made an effort to get home sooner, and not leave everything upon my shoulders, especially with all the neighbors everywhere pretending, whenever I come into the room, that they were not talking about your having killed your brother—”
“Yes, yes, a most regrettable affair! But what, sweetheart, has been going amiss at Bellegarde?”
“That is a pretty question for you to ask, with me in my condition, with all these other worries on top of it, about your friend Orléans. Because, knowing you as well as I do, Florian, and not being able to feel as you do that a prime minister is no more than a house fly or a flea,—and seeing quite well, too, how little you consider what my feelings naturally would be if they cut off your head—”
“Ah, but let us take one thing at a time, and for the present leave my head where it is. Do you mean that you have been unwell, my pet?”
“Have you no eyes in the head you keep talking about just to keep me upset! But I do not wonder you prefer not to look at me, now I am such a fright, and that is you men all over. Still, you might at least have the decency to remember who is responsible for it, and that much I must say.”
“But, dearest, I have both the eyes about which you inquire, and in those doubtless partial orbs you happen not to look a fright. So I cannot quite follow you. No, let us be logical! There is a slight pallor, to be sure—But, no! No, dear Melior, upon the whole, I never saw you looking lovelier, and I wonder of what you are talking.”
“I mean, you fool, that I am sick and miserable because now almost any day I am going to have a baby.”
Florian was honestly shocked. He could remember no precedent among his mistresses of anybody’s having put this news so bluntly: and when he recalled the behavior of his first wife in precisely these circumstances, he could not but feel that women were deteriorating. A wife endowed with proper sensibility would have hidden her face upon his shoulder, just as Carola had done, and would in this posture have whispered her awed surmise that Heaven was shortly to consign them a little cherub. But this big-bellied vixen appeared to have no sensibilities. “You fool, now almost any day I am going to have a baby!” was neither a loving nor a dignified way of announcing the nearness of his freedom.
But Florian’s plump face was transfigured, as he knelt before his Melior, and very reverently lifted to his lips her hand. He slipped a cushion under his knee, made himself comfortable, and, kneeling still, went on to speak of his bliss and of his love for her and of how sacred in his eyes appeared the marks of her condition. She listened: he could see that Melior was pleased; and he in consequence continued his gallant romanticizing.
For Florian really wanted to be pleasant to the woman; and was resolved politely to ignore even this last disillusionment, and to condone as far as was humanly possible, the lack of consideration through which this dreadful creature had now added to stupidity and garrulity even physical ugliness.