Stamping her foot, she stammered:  “Do you think that that fool, that idiot, knows anything about it?”

Bondel did not grow angry; he was reasoning clearly:  “Excuse me.  This gentleman is no fool.  He seemed to me, on the contrary, to be very intelligent and shrewd; and you can’t make me believe that a man with brains doesn’t notice such a thing in his own house, when the neighbors, who are not there, are ignorant of no detail of this liaison—­for I’ll warrant that they know everything.”

Madame Bondel had a fit of angry mirth, which irritated her husband’s nerves.  She laughed:  “Ha! ha! ha! they’re all the same!  There’s not a man alive who could discover a thing like that unless his nose was stuck into it!”

The discussion was wandering to other topics now.  She was exclaiming over the blindness of deceived husbands, a thing which he doubted and which she affirmed with such airs of personal contempt that he finally grew angry.  Then the discussion became an angry quarrel, where she took the side of the women and he defended the men.  He had the conceit to declare:  “Well, I swear that if I had ever been deceived, I should have noticed it, and immediately, too.  And I should have taken away your desire for such things in such a manner that it would have taken more than one doctor to set you on foot again!”

Boiling with anger, she cried out to him:  “You! you! why, you’re as big a fool as the others, do you hear!”

He still maintained:  “I can swear to you that I am not!”

She laughed so impertinently that he felt his heart beat and a chill run down his back.  For the third time he said: 

“I should have seen it!”

She rose, still laughing in the same manner.  She slammed the door and left the room, saying:  “Well! if that isn’t too much!”

Bondel remained alone, ill at ease.  That insolent, provoking laugh had touched him to the quick.  He went outside, walked, dreamed.  The realization of the loneliness of his new life made him sad and morbid.  The neighbor, whom he had met that morning, came to him with outstretched hands.  They continued their walk together.  After touching on various subjects they came to talk of their wives.  Both seemed to have something to confide, something inexpressible, vague, about these beings associated with their lives; their wives.  The neighbor was saying: 

“Really, at times, one might think that they bear some particular ill-will toward their husband, just because he is a husband.  I love my wife—­I love her very much; I appreciate and respect her; well! there are times when she seems to have more confidence and faith in our friends than in me.”

Bondel immediately thought:  “There is no doubt; my wife was right!”