Artists' Wives Part 10

"Ah no! my old friend, indeed I do not lie. You need only to look around you presently, when you enter the reception hall. You will see a malicious gleam in every eye, a smile at the corner of every lip, while they will whisper as you pa.s.s by: 'Here is the beautiful Madame Guillardin's husband.' For you will never be anything else in life, my dear fellow, but the husband of a pretty woman."

This time, Guillardin could bear it no longer. Pale with rage, he bounded forward, to seize and dash into the fire, after first tearing from it the pretty green palm wreath, this insolent and raving coat; but a door opens and a well-known voice, tinged with a mixture of contempt and mild condescension, opportunely awakes him from his horrible nightmare:

"Oh! that is just like you, asleep at the corner of the fire on such an important day!"

And Madame Guillardin stands before him, tall and still handsome, although rather too imposing with her almost natural pink complexion, her powdered hair, and the exaggerated brilliancy of her painted eyes.

With the gesture of the superior woman, she takes up the green-palmed coat, and briskly, with a little smile, helps her husband to don it; while he, poor man, still trembling with the horrors of his nightmare, draws a deep sigh of relief and thinks to himself: "Thank goodness! It was a dream!"