Dunoisse answered her in tones she had never before heard from him:
“The Prince-President should know that the droit du seigneur went out with the Monarchy. It is not an institution that the Republic of France will wish to see revived during His Highness’s tenure of the Dictatorship.... I will explain this to His Highness without delay!”
Her beautiful eyes blazed rebellion, and her bosom tossed the red mark up and down tumultuously. She cried:
“Are you mad? What right have you to demand explanations, or to give them, pray?”
“What right?” Dunoisse echoed, looking at her incredulously. “Do you ask by what right I say that you shall not be degraded by the contact of persons who are infamous—used as a bait to lure golden fish into the net of Presidential intrigue?—poisoned and contaminated by the atmosphere in which nothing that is pure can exist, and everything that is vile——”
“Ah, ah!” she said, interrupting him; “you talk in riddles and parables. Be plain with me, I beg of you! Or—permit me to be so with you!”
She sank down upon a divan with her knees apart, and said, thrusting her clasped hands down between them, joined together at the wrists as though they were fettered:
“Listen to me!... You are not my husband!... I advise you to remember it!... It will save trouble in the long-run—it will be better for yourself and for me if you will do this!”
Dunoisse returned, in tones that cut like ice-splinters:
“I have not the honor to be your husband, it is true! But as long as the relations which have hitherto existed between us continue, I forbid you to go alone to the suppers at the Élysée! As for that accursed banquet of the night before last——”