"My dear fellow,édé you don't like capricious women, you say, and, for my part, I detest a person who begins a sentence, then stops, and doesn't finish it. There's nothing so impertinent as that, in my opinion! It is almost equivalent to a confession that you had something disagreeable to say, and discovered it in time. Sometimes our conjectures go beyond the truth. Finish what you were going to say, I insist! I demand it! or I am done with you! Come, quickly! don't try to fabricate something, for you would simply lie."
Frédérique pressed me so hard that I had no time to invent a lie, as often happens in such cases, and I replied, almost shamefacedly:
"I was thinking of Monsieur--Saint-Bergame; and I was wondering about a lot of things. You told me that you and he had quarrelled. But are you not afraid of offending him still more, if he knows that you had guests to-night at supper?"
Frédérique compressed her lips and frowned. I realized that I had been indiscreet, that I had no right to ask such questions; but the thought had been at the end of my tongue for some time, and it must escape me sooner or later; it had been tormenting me since the very beginning of the supper.
"What on earth made you think of Monsieur Saint-Bergame?" cried Frédérique at last, with something very like anger. "Would you have liked to have him here? Would you have enjoyed being with him? In that case, you are not like him, for he can't endure you. I don't know why it is, but he is not attracted to you."
"I do not regret the gentleman's absence in the least, far from it! But it surprised me, because----"
"Because you had guessed that he was my lover, eh? Mon Dieu! it did not require much perspicacity to discover that!"
"Well! as you make no concealment of it, you ought not to be angry because I ask the question."
"There are some things that one doesn't conceal, or conceals imperfectly, that one doesn't like to have thrown in one's face, none the less. But you have said a lot of----"
"Stupid things! Finish the sentence, pray! I am like you, I hate unfinished sentences."
"Well, yes! _Stupid_ isn't just the word, but things that people keep to themselves when they think them."
"I beg your pardon. I have the bad habit of saying whatever comes into my mind. It's a serious fault, I admit, and I have often had occasion to regret it in society. I regret it all the more, because I see that it has annoyed you, for you have ceased to _tutoyer_ me; and yet you were the one who said to me just now: 'Let us have no secrets from each other.'"