The house was in the rue Montgolfier, up five flights. I knocked and Anastasia answered the door. She looked as if she had been crying. There was a sound of conversation from an interior room, where I saw a table set for dinner, with the red checked table-cloth beloved of the bourgeois.
“What’s the matter?” I whispered.
“Oh, I’m so glad you come. Wat you think she want, that bad muzzaire of me? She ask another man here and she want that I leave you and marry him. He is quite rich, and she say she geeve me twenty tousand francs for dot. All afternoon she discute with me. She tell me I always am poor wiz you, and nevaire have much confort. And then she say you are stranger and some day you leave me. She tell me the uzzer man geeve me automobile and I will be very grand. And what you sink? When I say no, no, no, I nevaire, nevaire leeve you, she say she geeve you two tousand francs and you geeve me up like nothing. Oh, I ’ave awful, awful time.”
“I don’t care two pins for your mother,” I said. “But where’s the other party to this arrangement? Where’s the damned Frenchman? I’m going to knock his face in.”
Suddenly Madame Guinoval appeared, wearing a black satin robe that crackled on her and threatened to burst with every movement of her swelling muscles. The slightly moustached mouth was grim as a closed trap, and the red face was flushed and angry looking.
I was furious, but I tried to be calm.
“Madam,” I said, “Anastasia has just told me all. You are her mother so I do not express my opinion of you, but,” I added in a voice of thunder, “where is the sacred pig who wants to steal away my wife?”
There was a movement of alarm from the dining-room.
“Because here’s where I show,” I went on, “that an American is equal to two Frenchmen. Let me get at the brute.”
Anastasia clung to me, begging me to be calm, but Madame Guinoval was haughtily intrepid.