and so kind! They can hardly live on
the thousand crowns he gets as deputy-head of the office, for they have
got into debt since Marshal Montcornet's death. It is barbarity on the
part of the Government to suppose that a clerk with a wife and family
can live in Paris on two thousand four hundred francs a year."

And so, within a very short time, a young woman who affected regard for
her, who told her everything, and consulted her, who flattered her,
and seemed ready to yield to her guidance, had become dearer to the
eccentric Cousin Lisbeth than all her relations.

The Baron, on his part, admiring in Madame Marneffe such propriety,
education, and breeding as neither Jenny Cadine nor Josepha, nor any
friend of theirs had to show, had fallen in love with her in a
month, developing a senile passion, a senseless passion, which had an
appearance of reason. In fact, he found here neither the banter, nor the
orgies, nor the reckless expenditure, nor the depravity, nor the scorn
of social decencies, nor the insolent independence which had brought him
to grief alike with the actress and the singer. He was spared, too, the
rapacity of the courtesan, like unto the thirst of dry sand.

Madame Marneffe, of whom he had made a friend and confidante, made the
greatest difficulties over accepting any gift from him.

"Appointments, official presents, anything you can extract from the
Government; but do not begin by insulting a woman whom you profess to
love," said Valerie. "If you do, I shall cease to believe you--and
I like to believe you," she added, with a glance like Saint Theresa
leering at heaven.

Every time he made her a present there was a fortress to be stormed, a
conscience to be over-persuaded. The hapless Baron laid deep stratagems
to offer her some trifle--costly, nevertheless--proud of having at last
met with virtue and the realization of his dreams. In this primitive
household, as he assured himself, he was the god as much as in his own.
And Monsieur Marneffe seemed at a thousand leagues from suspecting that
the Jupiter of his office intended to descend on his wife in a shower of
gold; he was his august chief's humblest slave.

Madame Marneffe, twenty-three years of age, a pure and bashful
middle-class wife, a blossom hidden in the Rue du Doyenne, could know
nothing of the depravity and demoralizing harlotry which the Baron could
no longer think of without disgust, for he had never known the charm
of recalcitrant vi