Thus matters were in the Rue d'Assas, without anything seeming really changed, when, three or four months after her confinement, Lise spoke to her husband about inviting a few of their friends. Her surprise was great at this reply from Paul:
"What is the good of it? Let us live rather more for one another. Is it not enough to invite our own family, Madame Daubrel and Dumesnil? In their case you will have no need to go to expense over your dress, as you have to at the receptions in my studio."
Mme. Meyrin at first thought she had misunderstood him, either in the words spoken or their sense. The surprise she felt was so plainly to be seen in her eyes that the painter, taking her in his arms, added:
"Besides, you see, I am jealous. I should like now to have you a little more to myself. Oh, I don't want our door to be closed altogether, but only that it should not be opened so widely as it was last year."
He had spoken the first sentences with such an accent of truth that the poor woman, hearing in them, as it were, an echo of her most enchanting days, pressed against her husband with a voluptuous thrill. With him and her child by her she cared little for anything else.
Paul, however, soon grew more exacting, and his wife could not but be a little offended at hearing him each day advise some fresh reform, now about her dress, or even her hair, now as to the household expenses. But, blind through her love, she obeyed. She put away the most elegant of the dresses that she used formerly to wear, and at the same time, like a tradesman's good little wife, she began to look after the servants more closely.
The painter was not to stop here, however. One evening Lise had given an "At Home" to some friends—artists and literary men they were—who expressed surprise that, having so long ago recovered from her confinement, she had not resumed her receptions in the old style. When they were gone Paul said:
"I doubt whether it is quite the thing to have all these people here so long as you are suckling Marie. You are obliged to dress, for one thing, and that must be tiresome for you. Then again, the baby may want you suddenly, and, you know, respectable as the part of a nurse is, it still makes people smile a little, and may lead to pleasantries such as I would not wish to have spoken about you."
This time Mme. Meyrin did not take pains to hide her surprise; indeed, she expressed it with such frankness that her husband, inspired to the brutality by remembering one of his sister-in-law's remarks, said:
"Deuce take it, my dear, you are not a princess now, and the sort of people we know are less indulgent than the great folk of St. Petersburg. I don't want to have people laughing at me."