“What do you want to eat?”

“I don’t care; order whatever is good.”

After handing his coat to the waiter, he ordered dinner and champagne.  The waiter looked at the young woman and smiled.  He took the order and murmured: 

“Will Monsieur Paul have his champagne sweet or dry?”

“Dry, very dry.”

Henriette was pleased to hear that this man knew her husband’s name.  They sat on the couch, side by side, and began to eat.

Ten candles lighted the room and were reflected in the mirrors all around them, which seemed to increase the brilliancy a thousand-fold.  Henriette drank glass after glass in order to keep up her courage, although she felt dizzy after the first few glasses.  Paul, excited by the memories which returned to him, kept kissing his wife’s hands.  His eyes were sparkling.

She was feeling strangely excited in this new place, restless, pleased, a little guilty, but full of life.  Two waiters, serious, silent, accustomed to seeing and forgetting everything, to entering the room only when it was necessary and to leaving it when they felt they were intruding, were silently flitting hither and thither.

Toward the middle of the dinner, Henriette was well under the influence of champagne.  She was prattling along fearlessly, her cheeks flushed, her eyes glistening.

“Come, Paul; tell me everything.”

“What, sweetheart?”

“I don’t dare tell you.”

“Go on!”

“Have you loved many women before me?”

He hesitated, a little perplexed, not knowing whether he should hide his adventures or boast of them.

She continued: 

“Oh! please tell me.  How many have you loved?”

“A few.”

“How many?”

“I don’t know.  How do you expect me to know such things?”

“Haven’t you counted them?”

“Of course not.”

“Then you must have loved a good many!”

“Perhaps.”

“About how many?  Just tell me about how many.”

“But I don’t know, dearest.  Some years a good many, and some years only a few.”

“How many a year, did you say?”

“Sometimes twenty or thirty, sometimes only four or five.”

“Oh! that makes more than a hundred in all!”

“Yes, just about.”

“Oh!  I think that is dreadful!”

“Why dreadful?”

“Because it’s dreadful when you think of it—­all those women—­and always—­always the same thing.  Oh! it’s dreadful, just the same—­more than a hundred women!”

He was surprised that she should think that dreadful, and answered, with the air of superiority which men take with women when they wish to make them understand that they have said something foolish: 

“That’s funny!  If it is dreadful to have a hundred women, it’s dreadful to have one.”

“Oh, no, not at all!”

“Why not?”