ady been given_--I love small ears, but
let me have a model of yours, and I will do anything you like--_du
Tillet profited by this to throw the whole loss on your idiotic
husband_: oh, what a charming silk, you are divinely dressed!"

"Where were we, sir?"

"How can I remember while admiring your Raphaelistic head?"

At the twenty-seventh compliment, Caroline considers the syndic a man
of wit: she makes him a polite speech, and goes away without learning
much more of the enterprise which, not long before had swallowed up
three hundred thousand francs.

There are many huge variations of this petty trouble.

EXAMPLE. Adolphe is brave and susceptible: he is walking on the Champs
Elysees, where there is a crowd of people; in this crowd are several
ill-mannered young men who indulge in jokes of doubtful propriety:
Caroline puts up with them and pretends not to hear them, in order to
keep her husband out of a duel.

ANOTHER EXAMPLE. A child belonging to the genus Terrible, exclaims in
the presence of everybody:

"Mamma, would you let Justine hit me?"

"Certainly not."

"Why do you ask, my little man?" inquires Madame Foullepointe.

"Because she just gave father a big slap, and he's ever so much
stronger than me."

Madame Foullepointe laughs, and Adolphe, who intended to pay court to
her, is cruelly joked by her, after having had a first last quarrel
with Caroline.

THE LAST QUARREL.

In every household, husbands and wives must one day hear the striking
of a fatal hour. It is a knell, the death and end of jealousy, a
great, noble and charming passion, the only true symptom of love, if
it is not even its double. When a woman is no longer jealous of her
husband, all is over, she loves him no more. So, conjugal love expires
in the last quarrel that a woman gives herself the trouble to raise.

Axiom.--When a woman ceases to quarrel with her husband, the Minotaur
has seated himself in a corner arm-chair, tapping his boots with his
cane.

Every woman must remember her last quarrel, that supreme petty trouble
which often explodes about nothing, but more often still on some
occasion of a brutal fact or of a decisive proof. This cruel farewell
to faith, to the childishness of love, to virtue even, is in a degree
as capricious as life itself. Like life it varies in every house.

Here, the author ought perhaps to search out all the varieties of
quarrels, if he desires to be preci