"How should I know?... Probably she died in a hospital."
"Auguste,... if that were true you would not speak so flippantly."
"Well, then, to tell you the truth, she is married to a respectable man, and when I came of age I gave her a small dowry."
"How good of you!... But why do you try to make yourself out so evil?"
"Oh, I am good enough.... The more I think of it the more I persuade myself that this woman really did care for me.... But on the other hand, it is difficult to discern true feeling under such a ridiculous expression of it."
"You ought to have shown me your letter. I should not have been jealous.... We women have finer tact than you, and we can tell at a glance, from the style of a letter, whether the writer is sincere, or feigning a passion he does not really feel."
"But what a number of times you have allowed yourself to be taken in by fools and rogues!"
As he spoke he looked at the Etruscan vase with a threatening glance, to which his voice responded, but Mathilde went on without noticing anything.
"Come, now, all you men wish to pose as Don Juans. You fancy you are making dupes when often you have encountered only Doña Juana, who is much more cunning than yourselves."
"I perceive that with your superior wit you ladies scent out rakes in every place. I doubt not also that our friend Massigny, who was both a stupid and a coxcomb, became, when dead, spotless and a martyr."