ms to have more confidence and faith in our
friends than in me."

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

When he left this man he began to think things over again. He felt in
his soul a strange confusion of contradictory ideas, a sort of interior
burning; that mocking, impertinent laugh kept ringing in his ears and
seemed to say: "Why; you are just the same as the others, you fool!"
That was indeed bravado, one of those pieces of impudence of which a
woman makes use when she dares everything, risks everything, to wound
and humiliate the man who has aroused her ire. This poor man must also
be one of those deceived husbands, like so many others. He had said
sadly: "There are times when she seems to have more confidence and
faith in our friends than in me." That is how a husband formulated his
observations on the particular attentions of his wife for another man.
That was all. He had seen nothing more. He was like the rest--all the
rest!

And how strangely Bondel's own wife had laughed as she said: "You, too
--you, too." How wild and imprudent these creatures are who can arouse
such suspicions in the heart for the sole purpose of revenge!

He ran over their whole life since their marriage, reviewed his mental
list of their acquaintances, to see whether she had ever appeared to
show more confidence in any one else than in himself. He never had
suspected any one, he was so calm, so sure of her, so confident.

But, now he thought of it, she had had a friend, an intimate friend, who
for almost a year had dined with them three times a week. Tancret, good
old Tancret, whom he, Bendel, loved as a brother and whom he continued
to see on the sly, since his wife, he did not know why, had grown angry
at the charming fellow.

He stopped to think, looking over the past with anxious eyes. Then he
grew angry at himself for harboring this shameful insinuation of the
defiant, jealous, bad ego which lives in all of us. He blamed and
accused himself when he remembered the visits and the demeanor of
this friend whom his wife had dismissed for no apparent reason. But,
suddenly, other memories returned to him, similar ruptures due to the
vindictive character of Madame Bondel, who never pardoned a slight. Then
he laughed frankly at himself for the doubts which he had nursed; and
he remembered the angry looks of his wife as he would tell her, when
he returned at night: "I saw good old Tancret, and he wished to