“Oh dear! that would be the last straw.”
“No, it’s nothing, it’s going away; I was in a constrained position.”
“We expect to dinner Monsieur and Madame Dufournelle; Madame Dufournelle wants to act; she will be terribly awkward on the stage, I fancy, but that’s her business!”
“She is graceful and pretty, and I believe that she will make a success of it.”
“Oh! that’s just like a man! to call that woman pretty, just because she is always laughing, and because she is a great flirt; indeed she carries it so far sometimes as to be almost indecent in her behavior with men!”
“Upon my word, Lolotte! where did you see that?”
“I have seen it more than once; and in our own house, in the country, with you, when she asked you to run after her and defied you to catch her! Monsieur ran like a deer, and then you both disappeared behind a hedge.—You had no pain in your stomach that day!”
“Madame! really, you should not say such things; your daughter can hear you.”
“My daughter will be married some day, monsieur, and there’s no harm in her being warned beforehand of the perfidy of the male sex. Besides, Madame Dufournelle’s coquetry is evident to everybody. Her husband sees nothing in all that! Poor fellow! so long as he has somebody to play billiards with him, he doesn’t care about anything else.”
“He isn’t jealous, madame, and he is very wise; that proves that he has some intelligence.”