The stream of carriages, with dashes of sunlight reflected in the silver trappings of the harness and the glass of the lamps, flowed on in a double current toward the town and toward the Bois, and the Comte de Mascaret continued:  “My dear Gabrielle!”

Unable to control herself any longer, she replied in an exasperated voice:  “Oh! do leave me in peace, pray!  I am not even allowed to have my carriage to myself now.”  He pretended not to hear her and continued:  “You never have looked so pretty as you do to-day.”

Her patience had come to an end, and she replied with irrepressible anger:  “You are wrong to notice it, for I swear to you that I will never have anything to do with you in that way again.”

The count was decidedly stupefied and upset, and, his violent nature gaining the upper hand, he exclaimed:  “What do you mean by that?” in a tone that betrayed rather the brutal master than the lover.  She replied in a low voice, so that the servants might not hear amid the deafening noise of the wheels:  “Ah!  What do I mean by that?  What do I mean by that?  Now I recognize you again!  Do you want me to tell everything?”

“Yes.”

“Everything that has weighed on my heart since I have been the victim of your terrible selfishness?”

He had grown red with surprise and anger and he growled between his closed teeth:  “Yes, tell me everything.”

He was a tall, broad-shouldered man, with a big red beard, a handsome man, a nobleman, a man of the world, who passed as a perfect husband and an excellent father, and now, for the first time since they had started, she turned toward him and looked him full in the face:  “Ah!  You will hear some disagreeable things, but you must know that I am prepared for everything, that I fear nothing, and you less than any one to-day.”

He also was looking into her eyes and was already shaking with rage as he said in a low voice:  “You are mad.”

“No, but I will no longer be the victim of the hateful penalty of maternity, which you have inflicted on me for eleven years!  I wish to take my place in society as I have the right to do, as all women have the right to do.”

He suddenly grew pale again and stammered:  “I do not understand you.”

“Oh! yes; you understand me well enough.  It is now three months since I had my last child, and as I am still very beautiful, and as, in spite of all your efforts you cannot spoil my figure, as you just now perceived, when you saw me on the doorstep, you think it is time that I should think of having another child.”

“But you are talking nonsense!”

“No, I am not, I am thirty, and I have had seven children, and we have been married eleven years, and you hope that this will go on for ten years longer, after which you will leave off being jealous.”

He seized her arm and squeezed it, saying:  “I will not allow you to talk to me like that much longer.”