air, measuring the height of the rooms, sketching the plan in
his note-book, with the passages, the arrangements of the exits,
explaining that he was a medical man and had many visitors. He must
have a broad and well-kept staircase; nor could he be any higher up
than the first floor.

After having written down seven or eight addresses and scribbled two
hundred notes, he got home to breakfast a quarter of an hour too late.

In the hall he heard the clatter of plates. Then they had begun
without him! Why? They were never wont to be so punctual. He was
nettled and put out, for he was somewhat thin-skinned. As he went in
Roland said to him:

"Come, Pierre, make haste, devil take you! You know we have to be at
the lawyer's at two o'clock. This is not the day to be dawdling
about."

Pierre sat down without replying, after kissing his mother and shaking
hands with his father and brother; and he helped himself from the deep
dish in the middle of the table to the cutlet which had been kept for
him. It was cold and dry, probably the least tempting of them all. He
thought that they might have left it on the hot plate till he came in,
and not lose their heads so completely as to have forgotten their
other son, their eldest.

The conversation, which his entrance had interrupted, was taken up
again at the point where it had ceased.

"In your place," Mme. Roland was saying to Jean, "I will tell you what
I should do at once. I should settle in handsome rooms so as to
attract attention; I should rise on horseback and select one or two
interesting cases to defend and make a mark in court. I would be a
sort of amateur lawyer, and very select. Thank God you are out of all
danger of want, and if you pursue a profession, it is, after all, only
that you may not lose the benefit of your studies, and because a man
ought never to sit idle."

Old Roland, who was peeling a pear, exclaimed:

"Christi! In your place I should buy a nice yacht, a cutter on the
build of our pilot-boats. I would sail as far as Senegal in such a
boat as that."

Pierre, in his turn, spoke his views. After all, said he, it was not
his wealth which made the moral worth, the intellectual worth of a
man. To a man of inferior mind it was only a means of degradation,
while in the hands of a strong man it was a powerful lever. They, to
be sure, were rare. If Jean were a really superior man, now that he
could never want he might prove it. But then he must work a hund