These were her gala days. She wanted them to be sumptuous, and when he alone could not pay the expenses, she made up the deficit liberally, which happened pretty well every time. He tried to make her understand that they would be quite as comfortable somewhere else, in a smaller hotel, but she always found some objection.
One day she drew six small silver-gilt spoons from her bag (they were old Roualt’s wedding present), begging him to pawn them at once for her, and Léon obeyed, though the proceeding annoyed him. He was afraid of compromising himself.
Then, on, reflection, he began to think his mistress’s ways were growing odd, and that they were perhaps not wrong in wishing to separate him from her.
In fact someone had sent his mother a long anonymous letter to warn her that he was “ruining himself with a married woman,” and the good lady at once conjuring up the eternal bugbear of families, the vague pernicious creature, the siren, the monster, who dwells fantastically in depths of love, wrote to Lawyer Dubocage, his employer, who behaved perfectly in the affair.