“Why so?”
“Because you loved her better than your cousin.”
He looked at me with strange, round, startled eyes, then he stammered:
“I loved her ... I? ... how? Who told you that?...”
“Why, any one can see it ... and that’s why you were so long in marrying your cousin, who waited six years for you.”
He dropped the ball that he was holding in his left hand, seized the chalk-cloth with both hands, and, hiding his face with it, began to sob into it. He wept in a distressing, ridiculous way, as a sponge weeps when it is squeezed, from his eyes and nose and mouth all at once. And he coughed and hawked, blew his nose into the chalk-cloth, wiped his eyes, sneezed, began running again from every aperture in his face, with a throaty noise that suggested gargling.
As for me, frightened and ashamed, I wanted to make my escape and was at my wits’ end to know what to say, or to do, or try.
And suddenly Madame Chantal’s voice sounded on the stairs, “Will you soon be done with your smoke?”
I opened the door and called, “Yes, Madame, we are coming down.”
Then I rushed to her husband, and seizing him by the elbows said, “Monsieur Chantal, my good friend Chantal, listen; your wife is calling you; pull yourself together, pull yourself together at once; we must go downstairs; pull yourself together.”