But his wife did not give me time to speak: she sprang upon me with the glassy, phosphorescent eyes of a maddened cat.

"Don't listen to this buffoon, hypocrite, clown! It is not his daughter he's thinking about, it is not the figure he would cut! He wants to hang about here all day, because here it would be like being in his own garden, with all the pretty ladies he's so fond of, artists like himself, mincing round him! And he's not ashamed, the scoundrel, to put his daughter forward as an excuse, to shelter behind his daughter, at the cost of compromising her and ruining her, the wretch! He would have the excuse of bringing his daughter here, you understand? He would come here for his daughter!"

"But you would come too," Fabrizio Cavalena shouted, losing all patience. "Aren't you here too? With me?"

"I?" roared his wife. "I, here?"