"Pshaw! Mademoiselle Frotard, is there any law against my knowing a good-looking man? I believe I have a right to have known more than one; I'm twenty-four; I don't make any secret of my age, and I don't play the prude. I certainly don't claim to be a perfect innocent----" "I'd like to see those boxes with salons; I shan't be happy till I've been in one." "You must get your lover to take you, some day when he's in funds." "My lover's never in funds; I don't know what he does with his money; he wouldn't treat me to a glass of cider! He pretends that he puts every sou in the savings bank against the time we get married." "Believe that and drink water, my poor Sophie!--Pins, please." "The large scissors." "Here they are." "However, he took me to the theatre once, because somebody'd given him the tickets. That day, I remember, we dined in my room, on very little, and I was very hungry at the theatre; it was a theatre on the boulevard, and the play was a long melodrama. At half-past eleven we still had four acts to see. But in the play, where the scene was a farmhouse, and peasants coming home from work, all of a sudden they brought on a big wooden bowl and went to eating cabbage soup. It was real cabbage soup, I can tell you, and it was smoking hot and smelt awful good. Imagine the effect it produced on us, hungry as we were!--'I've a good mind to apply at once to be admitted to the chorus,' I says to Oscar; but he had already got up and opened the door of the box, where we were all alone, and called the opener; when she came, I heard him say: 'Madame, my wife's in a situation where it ain't safe to refuse her anything--a situation in which women are subject to the strangest whims and the most extraordinary desires; you understand what I mean--she's enceinte. Well, after a dinner fit for the angels, at Véry's, here she is acting like a madwoman because she smells the cabbage soup they're eating on the stage. She wants some of it, says she must have it, and threatens me with a plate of soup as offspring if I don't satisfy her craving. Isn't there some way of doing it, madame? there's no sacrifice I'm not capable of making to prevent my wife's giving me a cabbage for a son.'--The opener, hoping to be handsomely paid, replied: 'Never fear, monsieur; I'll just go down and tell 'em at the office, and they'll send word on to the stage; your wife shall have some cabbage soup, I promise you.'--'A thousand thanks, madame,' says Oscar. 'Please go and ask for a lot of it at once, for in her present condition, when we dine at a restaurant, my wife always eats soup enough for four, and it doesn't do her a bit of harm.'--The box opener went off, and Oscar came back to his seat. You can judge whether I wanted to laugh. 'Keep quiet,' says my lover, 'and try to look as if you were in the condition I said you were; we are going to sup at the expense of the management; it won't hurt them, and it will give us great pleasure.'--And, sure enough, in a