Then, becoming once more serious, she carefully examined on her head the almost imperceptible thread she had found, and murmured: “It is not Madeleine’s, it is too dark.”
He smiled, saying: “It is very likely one of the maid’s.”
But she was inspecting the waistcoat with the attention of a detective, and collected a second hair rolled round a button; then she perceived a third, and pale and somewhat trembling, exclaimed: “Oh, you have been sleeping with a woman who has wrapped her hair round all your buttons.”
He was astonished, and gasped out: “No, you are mad.”
All at once he remembered, understood it all, was uneasy at first, and then denied the charge with a chuckle, not vexed at the bottom that she should suspect him of other loves. She kept on searching, and still found hairs, which she rapidly untwisted and threw on the carpet. She had guessed matters with her artful woman’s instinct, and stammered out, vexed, angry, and ready to cry: “She loves you, she does—and she wanted you to take away something belonging to her. Oh, what a traitor you are!” But all at once she gave a cry, a shrill cry of nervous joy. “Oh! oh! it is an old woman—here is a white hair. Ah, you go in for old women now! Do they pay you, eh—do they pay you? Ah, so you have come to old women, have you? Then you have no longer any need of me. Keep the other one.”
She rose, ran to her bodice thrown onto a chair, and began hurriedly to put it on again. He sought to retain her, stammering confusedly: “But, no, Clo, you are silly. I do not know anything about it. Listen now—stay here. Come, now—stay here.”
She repeated: “Keep your old woman—keep her. Have a ring made out of her hair—out of her white hair. You have enough of it for that.”