“It will go now. There was only a little thing to fix.”
“You must do the same with the other one now,” said Madame Giraud, “for, as you see, that won’t burn.”
“Ah! that’s so. Well! I’ll take it out and do the same thing to it.”
Madame Giraud detained her husband as he was going to take the other lamp, and said to him in an undertone, but not so low that I could not hear her:
“Just fancy that Dufloc refusing to sing!”
“The deuce! really?”
“He says that he has a cold.”
“It’s just spitefulness. It’s because we haven’t invited him to dinner.”
“We must start something, however. There’s no life at all in the thing.”
“We had better begin the dancing right away.”