"I? why nothing." She laughed lightly. "I'm not jealous—pas si bête! He was always very kind to me and I liked to watch his little affairs. But in this instance it proved tragic..."
She smiled the meaning out of the word.
"What happened?" McTaggart asked, his eyes still on the distant "Flora."
"She was very pretty—the wild-rose type—and poor Gustave was quite captured. You see, she always wore gloves..." She paused with a pensive, teasing air.
"Too tight, perhaps? or shabby, eh?" He remembered her sweeping remarks.
"Oh, dear, no—far worse than that! One evening she took them off and he found ... that she actually bit her nails!"
"And that finished it?"
Fantine nodded as the waiter handed McTaggart's bill.
"But, of course! Gustave wept with chagrin. But I told him it was his own fault. He should have laid his volatile heart at the feet of a Parisienne."
"The love then was only skin-deep?"