about women like a peacock spreading his tail. He came to imagine that they all looked at him and wanted him. It made it hard when he began to grow old.
“Oh, sir, when I saw his first white hair, it gave me a shock that took my breath away, and then joy … a cruel joy—but so deep, so deep. I said to myself: ‘It’s the end … it’s the end.’ I felt that I was going to be let out of prison. I should have him all to myself, when the others didn’t want him any more.
“It was one morning, in our bed. He was still sleeping, and I was bending over him to waken him with a caress, when I saw in the curls on his temple a little thread that shone like silver. What a surprise! I would not have believed it possible. For a moment I thought of pulling it out, so that he shouldn’t see it himself! but looking closely, I caught sight of another one higher up. White hairs! He was going to have white hairs! It made my heart beat and my skin wet; but all the same, in the bottom of my heart, I was very glad about it.
“It’s not pleasant to think of it, but I went about my work in rare spirits that morning, and I didn’t wake him just then; and when he had opened his eyes without being roused, I said to him:
“ ‘Do you know what I discovered when you were asleep?’
“ ‘No.’
“ ‘I discovered that you have some white hairs.’
“He gave a start of vexation that made him sit down as if I had tickled him, and he said in an annoyed way:
“ ‘It’s not true.’
“ ‘Yes, on the left temple. There are four of them.’
“He jumped from the bed to run to the mirror.
“He did not find them. Then I showed him the first, the lowest down, the little curly one, and I said to him:
“ ‘It’s not surprising considering the life you lead. Two years from now you’ll be finished.’
“Well, sir, I spoke truly; two years later, you wouldn’t have known him. How quickly a man changes! He was still handsome but he was losing his freshness, and women no longer ran after him. Oh, I had a hard life of it, I did, in those days: he made me suffer cruelly for it! Nothing pleased him, not the least thing. He left his profession for the hat trade, in which he got rid of a lot of money. And then he tried to be an actor, without any success, and then he began to frequent public dances. Well, he has had the good sense to keep a little of his money, on which we’re living. It’s enough, but it’s not much. To think that at one time he had almost a fortune!
“Now you see what he does. It’s like a frenzy that takes hold on him. He must be young, he must dance with women who smell of scent and pomade. Poor old darling that he is!”
Moved, ready to weep, she looked at her old husband, who was snoring. Then, drawing near him with light steps, she dropped a kiss on his hair. The doctor had risen and was preparing to leave; he could find nothing to say in the presence of this fantastic pair.
Then, as he was going, she asked:
“Will you just give me your address? If he gets worse I will come and fetch you.”
The Test
I
A pleasant couple the Bondels, though a little bellicose. They often quarrelled, from trivial causes, and then were reconciled. A retired tradesman who had given up business after amassing enough to live on in accordance with his simple tastes, Bondel had rented a little cottage at Saint Germain, and settled down there with his wife.
He was a placid-natured man, whose firmly rooted ideas reorientated themselves with difficulty. He had some education, read the more serious papers and had, however, an understanding of the finer shades of Gallic culture. Gifted with reason, logic, and the practical good sense that is the supreme quality of the hardworking French bourgeois, his thoughts were few but sure, and he made resolutions only on grounds that his instinct assured him to be infallible.
He was a man of middle height, and distinguished appearance, and he was going a little grey.
His wife, endowed with real qualities, had also some faults. Of a passionate nature, with a frankness of bearing that bordered on the violent, and obstinate to a degree, she cherished undying resentments against people. Once a pretty woman, she had become too plump and too highly coloured, but she passed even now, in their circle at Saint Germain, for a very lovely woman, though too miraculously healthy for genteel taste.
Their disputes almost always began at lunch, in the course of some quite unimportant discussion, and then they remained estranged until the evening, often until the next day. Their life, simple and limited as it was, lent a gravity to their lightest concerns, and every subject of conversation became a subject of dispute. It had not been so in other days, when they had a business that absorbed them, joined them in mutual anxieties, gripped their hearts, confined and imprisoned them both in bonds of partnership and a common interest.
But at Saint Germain they saw fewer people. It had been necessary to make new friends, to build for themselves, in a society of strangers, a life at once new and totally empty of occupation. Then, too, the monotony of hours that were all alike had made them a little bitter against each other, and the peaceful happiness for which they had hoped and which they had expected leisure to bring them, did not materialise.
They had just sat down to table one morning in the month of June, when Bondel asked:
“Do you know the people who live in the little red cottage at the end of the Rue de Berceau?”
Mme. Bondel must have
