“During those first days, those days of doubt, and before my suspicions increased and assumed a precise shape, I felt as depressed and chilly as when we are going to be seriously ill.  I was continually cold, really cold, and could neither eat nor sleep.  Why had she told me a lie?  What was she doing in that house?  I went there, to try and find out something, but I could discover nothing.  The man who rented the first floor, and who was an upholsterer, had told me all about his neighbors, but without helping me the least.  A midwife had lived on the second floor, a dressmaker and a manicure and chiropodist on the third, and two coachmen and their families in the attics.

“Why had she told me a lie?  It would have been so easy for her to have said that she had been to the dressmaker’s or the chiropodist’s.  Oh!  How I longed to question them, also!  I did not say so, for fear that she might guess my suspicions.  One thing, however, was certain; she had been into that house, and had concealed the fact from me, so there was some mystery in it.  But what?  At one moment, I thought there might be some laudable purpose in it, some charitable deed that she wished to hide, some information which she wished to obtain, and I found fault with myself for suspecting her.  Have not all of us the right of our little, innocent secrets, a kind of second, interior life, for which one ought not to be responsible to anybody?  Can a man, because he has taken a girl to be his companion through life, demand that she shall neither think nor do anything without telling him, either before or afterwards?  Does the word marriage mean renouncing all liberty and independence?  Was it not quite possible that she was going to the dressmaker’s without telling me, or that she was going to assist the family of one of the coachmen?  Or she might have thought that I might criticize, if not blame, her visit to the house.  She knew me thoroughly, and my slightest peculiarities, and perhaps she feared a discussion, even if she did not think that I should find fault with her.  She had very pretty hands, and I ended by supposing that she was having them secretly attended to by the manicure in the house which I suspected, and that she did not tell me of it, for fear that I should think her extravagant.  She was very methodical and economical, +and looked after all her household duties most carefully, and no doubt she thought that she should lower herself in my eyes, were she to confess that slight piece of feminine extravagance.  Women have very many subtleties and innate tricks in their soul!

“But none of my own arguments reassured me.  I was jealous, and I felt that my suspicion was affecting me terribly, that I was being devoured by it.  I felt secret grief and anguish, and a thought which I still veiled, and I did not dare to lift the veil, for beneath it I should find a terrible doubt....  A lover! ...  Had not she a lover? ...  It was unlikely, impossible....  A mere dream ... and yet? ...