tune of many a bourgeois. Oh, you Poles!" she said, gathering
some flowers in her greenhouse; "you are really incomprehensible. Why
are you not furious with him?"

"Poor Paz is--"

"Poor Paz, poor Paz, indeed!" she cried, interrupting him, "what good
does he do us? I shall take the management of the household myself. You
can give him the allowance he refused, and let him settle it as he likes
with his Circus."

"He is very useful to us, Clementine. He has certainly saved over forty
thousand francs this last year. And besides, my dear angel, he has
managed to put a hundred thousand with Nucingen, which a steward would
have pocketed."

Clementine softened down; but she was none the less hard in her feelings
to Thaddeus. A few days later, she requested him to come to that boudoir
where, one year earlier, she had been surprised into comparing him with
her husband. This time she received him alone, without perceiving the
slightest danger in so doing.

"My dear Paz," she said, with the condescending familiarity of the great
to their inferiors, "if you love Adam as you say you do, you will do
a thing which he will not ask of you, but which I, his wife, do not
hesitate to exact."

"About Malaga?" said Thaddeus, with bitterness in his heart.

"Well, yes," she said; "if you wish to end your days in this house
and continue good friends with us, you must give her up. How an old
soldier--"

"I am only thirty-five, and haven't a white hair."

"You look old," she said, "and that's the same thing. How so careful a
manager, so distinguished a--"

The horrible part of all this was her evident intention to rouse a sense
of honor in his soul which she thought extinct.

"--so distinguished a man as you are, Thaddeus," she resumed after a
momentary pause which a gesture of his hand had led her to make, "can
allow yourself to be caught like a boy! Your proceedings have made that
woman celebrated. My uncle wanted to see her, and he did see her. My
uncle is not the only one; Malaga receives a great many gentlemen. I did
think you such a noble soul. For shame! Will she be such a loss that you
can't replace her?"

"Madame, if I knew any sacrifice I could make to recover your esteem I
would make it; but to give up Malaga is not one--"

"In your position, that is what I should say myself, if I were a man,"
replied Clementine. "Well, if I accept it as a great sacrifice there can
be no ill-will between us."

Paz left the room, fear