"Are you going to fight each other?" he inquired in unusually bland tones.
At the sound of his voice the Russian woman's anger rose again, glad to
find some new object upon which to expend itself and on which to exercise
vengeance for the catastrophe its last expression had brought about. She
turned savagely upon the Count and shook her plump brown fists in his
face.
"It is all your fault!" she exclaimed. "What business have you to come
between husband and wife with your friends and your cursed dolls, the
fiend take them, and you! Is it for this that Christian Gregorovitch and I
have lived together in harmony these ten years and more? Is it for this
that we have lived without a word of anger--"
"What did you say?" asked Fischelowitz, with an angry laugh. But she did
not heed him.
"Without a word of anger between us, these many years?" she continued. "Is
it for this? To have our peace destroyed by a couple of Wiener Gigerls, a
doll and a sham count? But it is over now! It is over, I tell you--go, get
yourself out of the shop, out of my sight, into the street where you
belong! For honest folks to be harbouring such a fellow as you are, and
not you only, but your friends and your rag and your tag! Fie! If you stay
here long we shall end in dust and feathers! But you shall not stay here,
whatever that soft-brained husband of mine says. You shall go and never
come back. Do you think that in all Munich there is no one else who will
do the work for three marks a thousand? Bah! there are scores, and honest
people, too, who call themselves by plain names and speak plainly! None of
your counts and your grand dukes and your Lord-knows-whats! Go, you
adventurer, you disturber of--why do you look at me like that? I have
always known the truth about you, and I have never been able to bear the
sight of you and never shall.
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