Page:Selected Czech tales - 1925.djvu/82

 with Vendulka for having startled her so unnecessarily.

‘What Lukas has done, any other man in his place would have done,’ she said disapprovingly to the sobbing Vendulka. ‘What bridegroom would like his bride to set a person who is dead and gone above him, even if it should be his own wife? I can’t understand why this didn’t occur to you before you ran away. He is not the first man to be made mad by such behaviour as yours. Have you forgotten our Mráček, who went to keep house for her lover in a similar case? He too was a widower and had two children. She was just like you, and would not let him think of frivolous things; she was afraid of the dead woman’s ghost coming to her bedside at night. And what did he do? Slit up all the feather-beds and emptied them into the street—a regular snowfall we had, although it was St. Peter and St. Paul’s. And don’t you remember Kavka? When the bride forbade her bridegroom to pinch her cheeks, so as not to offend his wife in paradise, did he not straightway go to the grocer’s, bought up all the beer and emptied the barrels down the gutter, simply to annoy her? My dear girl, men are men; they want to be the masters at