"My dear little Marthe, I implore you--get up and dress yourself. It's for your own interest that I ask you to do it, for your luxury, for your comfort. What will become of you if, by a mere whim, by naughty wilfulness, we are to be reduced to poverty?" The word "poverty" conveyed absolutely no meaning to the Levantine. You could speak of it before her as you speak of death before small children. It failed to move her, as she had no idea what it was. At all events she was obstinately determined to remain in bed in her _djebba_, for, to emphasize her decision, she lighted a fresh cigarette from the one she had just finished, and while the Nabob enveloped his "darling little wife" in apologies and prayers and supplications, promising her a diadem of pearls a hundred times more beautiful than hers if she would come, she watched the heady smoke float up to the painted ceiling and wrapped herself in it as in imperturbable tranquillity. Finally, in face of that persistent refusal, that silence, that forehead upon which he detected the barrier of unconquerable obstinacy, Jansoulet gave rein to his wrath and drew himself up to his full height. "Very good," said he, "I say you shall." He turned to the negresses: "Dress your mistress, at once." And the boor that he really was, the son of the Southern junk-dealer coming to the surface in that crisis, which moved him to the depths of his being, he threw back the bedclothes with a brutal, contemptuous gesture, tossing the innumerable gewgaws they held to the floor, and forcing the half-naked Levantine to jump to her feet with a promptitude most remarkable in that bulky personage. She roared under the outrage, gathered the folds of her tunic about her misshapen bust, fixed her little cap crosswise over her falling hair, and began to blackguard her husband. "Never, you hear me, never--you shall never drag me to that--" Filth poured from her heavy lips as from the mouth of a drain. Jansoulet might well have believed that he was in one of the frightful dens along the water front in Marseille, listening to a quarrel between a prostitute and a _nervi_, or looking on at some open-air fracas between Genoese, Maltese and Provencal women gleaning on the quay around bags of grain in process of unloading, and reviling each other at full speed in eddies of golden dust. She was the typical seaport Levantine, the spoiled, neglected child, who from her terrace, or from her gondola, in the evening, has heard sailors cursing one another in all the languages of the Latin seas, and has remembered everything. The wretched man stared at her, horrified and dismayed at what she compelled him to hear, at her grotesque figure, foaming at the mouth and sputtering: "No, I won't go--no, I won't go!" And she was the mother of his children, an Afchin!