“You are in a hurry,” she returns.

And she goes on exhibiting herself with all her little airs, setting herself off like a fine peach magnificently exhibited in a fruiterer’s window.  But since you have dined rather heartily, you kiss her upon the forehead merely, not feeling able to countersign your opinions.  Caroline becomes serious.

The carriage waits.  All the household looks at Caroline as she goes out:  she is the masterpiece to which all have contributed, and everybody admires the common work.

Your wife departs highly satisfied with herself, but a good deal displeased with you.  She proceeds loftily to the ball, just as a picture, caressed by the painter and minutely retouched in the studio, is sent to the annual exhibition in the vast bazaar of the Louvre.  Your wife, alas! sees fifty women handsomer than herself:  they have invented dresses of the most extravagant price, and more or less original:  and that which happens at the Louvre to the masterpiece, happens to the object of feminine labor:  your wife’s dress seems pale by the side of another very much like it, but the livelier color of which crushes it.  Caroline is nobody, and is hardly noticed.  When there are sixty handsome women in a room, the sentiment of beauty is lost, beauty is no longer appreciated.  Your wife becomes a very ordinary affair.  The petty stratagem of her smile, made perfect by practice, has no meaning in the midst of countenances of noble expression, of self-possessed women of lofty presence.  She is completely put down, and no one asks her to dance.  She tries to force an expression of pretended satisfaction, but, as she is not satisfied, she hears people say, “Madame Adolphe is looking very ill to-night.”  Women hypocritically ask her if she is indisposed and “Why don’t you dance?” They have a whole catalogue of malicious remarks veneered with sympathy and electroplated with charity, enough to damn a saint, to make a monkey serious, and to give the devil the shudders.

You, who are innocently playing cards or walking backwards and forwards, and so have not seen one of the thousand pin-pricks with which your wife’s self-love has been tattooed, you come and ask her in a whisper, “What is the matter?”

“Order my carriage!”

This my is the consummation of marriage.  For two years she has said “my husband’s carriage,” “the carriage,” “our carriage,” and now she says “my carriage.”

You are in the midst of a game, you say, somebody wants his revenge, or you must get your money back.

Here, Adolphe, we allow that you have sufficient strength of mind to say yes, to disappear, and not to order the carriage.

You have a friend, you send him to dance with your wife, for you have commenced a system of concessions which will ruin you.  You already dimly perceive the advantage of a friend.

Finally, you order the carriage.  You wife gets in with concentrated rage, she hurls herself into a corner, covers her face with her hood, crosses her arms under her pelisse, and says not a word.