“Very well then,” she concluded. “I suspected as much! Oh, the poor pet. Do you know my aunt Lerat? When she comes get her to tell you the story about the fruiterer who lives opposite her. Just fancy that man—Damn it, how hot this fire is! I must turn round. I’m going to roast my left side now.” And as she presented her side to the blaze a droll idea struck her, and like a good-tempered thing, she made fun of herself for she was delighted to see that she was looking so plump and pink in the light of the coal fire. “I look like a goose, eh? Yes, that’s it! I’m a goose on the spit, and I’m turning, turning and cooking in my own juice, eh?” And she was once more indulging in a merry fit of laughter when a sound of voices and slamming doors became audible. Muffat was surprised, and he questioned her with a look. She grew serious, and an anxious expression came over her face. It must be Zoé’s cat, a cursed beast that broke everything. It was half-past twelve o’clock. How long was she going to bother herself in her cuckold’s behalf? Now that the other man had come she ought to get him out of the way, and that quickly. “What were you saying?” asked the count complaisantly, for he was charmed to see her so kind to him. But in her desire to be rid of him she suddenly changed her mood, became brutal and did not take care what she was saying. “Oh yes! The fruiterer and his wife. Well, my dear fellow, they never once touched one another! Not the least bit! She was very keen on it, you understand, but he, the ninny, didn’t know it. He was so green that he thought her a stick, and so he went elsewhere and took up with streetwalkers, who treated him to all sorts of nastiness, while she, on her part, made up for it beautifully with fellows who were a lot slyer than her greenhorn of a husband. And things always turn out that way through people not understanding one another. I know it, I do!” Muffat was growing pale. At last he was beginning to understand her allusions, and he wanted to make her keep silence. But she was in full swing. “No, hold your tongue, will you? If you weren’t brutes you would be as nice with your wives as you are with us, and if your wives weren’t geese they would take as much pains to keep you as we do to get you. That’s the way to behave. Yes, my duck, you can put that in your pipe and smoke it.” “Do not talk of honest women,” he said in a hard voice. “You do not know them.” At that Nana rose to her knees. “I don’t know them! Why, they aren’t even clean, your honest women aren’t! They aren’t even clean! I defy you to find me one who would dare show herself as I am doing. Oh, you make me laugh with your honest women. Don’t drive me to it; don’t oblige me to tell you things I may regret afterward.” The count, by way of answer, mumbled something insulting. Nana became quite pale in her turn. For some seconds she looked at him without speaking. Then in her decisive way: “What would you do if your wife were deceiving you?”