o listen to some idle
reasoning or foolish observation invariably outside of the subject
of discussion. Embarrassed and worried, he would cast us an imploring
glance, and strive to resume the interrupted conversation. Then at last,
wearied out by her familiar and constant contradiction, by the silliness
of her birdlike brain, inflated and empty as any cracknel, he held his
tongue, and silently resigned himself to let her go on to the bitter
end. But this determined silence exasperated Madame, seemed to her
more insulting, more disdainful than anything. Her sharp voice became
discordant, and growing higher and shriller, stung and buzzed, like
the ceaseless teasing of a fly, till at last her enraged husband in his
turn, burst out brutal and terrific.

She emerged from these incessant quarrels, which always ended in tears,
rested and refreshed, as a lawn after a watering, but he remained
broken, fevered, incapable of work, Little by little his very violence
was worn out One evening when I was present at one of these odious
scenes, as Madame Heurtebise triumphantly left the table, I saw on her
husband's face bent downwards during the quarrel and now upraised, an
expression of scorn and anger that no words could any longer express.
The little woman went off shutting the door with a sharp snap, and he,
flushed, with his eyes full of tears, and his mouth distorted by an
ironical and despairing smile, made like any school-boy behind his
master's back, an atrocious gesture of mingled rage and pain. After a
few moments, I heard him murmur, in a voice strangled by emotion: "Ah,
if it were not for the child, how I would be off at once!"

For they had a child, a poor little fellow, handsome and dirty, who
crawled all over the place, played with dogs bigger than himself, with
the spiders in the garden, and made mud-pies. His mother only noticed
him to declare him "disgusting" and that she had not put him out to
nurse.

[Illustration: p029-040]

She clung in fact to all the little shopkeeper traditions of her youth,
and the untidy home in which she went about from early morn in elaborate
costumes and astonishingly dressed hair, recalled the back-shops so dear
to her heart, rooms black with filth and want of air, where in the
short intervals of rest from commercial life, badly cooked meals were
hurriedly eaten, at a bare wooden table, listening all the while for the
tinkle of the shop-bell. With this class, nothing has importance b