Of late Jack Chicot had been a restless wanderer, spending very little of his life in the Cibber Street lodging. There was not even the pretence of union between his wife and him, and there never had been since La Chicot’s recovery. They were civil to each other, for the most part; but there were times when the wife’s tongue grew bitter, and her evil temper flashed out like a thin thread of forked lightning cleaving a dark summer sky. The husband was always civil. La Chicot could not exasperate him into retaliation.
‘You hate me too much to lose your temper with me,’ she said to him one day in the presence of the landlady; ‘you are afraid to trust yourself. If you gave way for a moment you might kill me. The temptation would be too strong for you.’
Jack Chicot said never a word, but stood with his arms folded, smiling at her, heaven knows how bitterly.
One day she stung him into speech.
‘You are in love with some other woman,’ she cried. ‘I know it.’
‘I have seen a woman who is not like you,’ he answered with a sigh.
‘And you are in love with her.’
‘For her unlikeness to you? That would be a charm, certainly.’
‘Go to her. Go to your ——’
The sentence ended in a foul epithet—one of the poison-flowers of Parisian argot.