is finger on his lips.
Grindot took the cue.

"Will it be very expensive?" said Constance to the architect.

"Oh, no, madame; six thousand francs at a rough guess."

"A rough guess!" exclaimed Madame Birotteau. "Monsieur, I entreat you,
begin nothing without an estimate and the specifications signed. I know
the ways of contractors: six thousand francs means twenty thousand.
We are not in a position to commit such extravagance. I beg you,
monsieur,--though of course my husband is master in his own house,--give
him time to reflect."

"Madame, monsieur the deputy-mayor has ordered me to deliver the
premises, all finished, in twenty days. If we delay, you will be likely
to incur the expense without obtaining the looked-for result."

"There are expenses and expenses," said the handsome mistress of "The
Queen of Roses."

"Ah! madame, do you think an architect who seeks to put up public
buildings finds it glorious to decorate a mere appartement? I have come
down to such details merely to oblige Monsieur de la Billardiere; and if
you fear--"

Here he made a movement to retreat.

"Well, well, monsieur," said Constance re-entering her daughter's room,
where she threw her head on Cesarine's shoulder.

"Ah, my daughter!" she cried, "your father will ruin himself! He has
engaged an architect with mustachios, who talks about public buildings!
He is going to pitch the house out of windows and build us a Louvre.
Cesar is never idle about his follies; he only spoke to me about it in
the night, and he begins it in the morning!"

"Never mind, mamma; let papa do as he likes. The good God has always
taken care of him," said Cesarine, kissing her mother and sitting down
to the piano, to let the architect know that the perfumer's daughter was
not ignorant of the fine arts.

When Grindot came in to measure the bedroom he was surprised and taken
aback at the beauty of Cesarine. Just out of her dressing-room and
wearing a pretty morning-gown, fresh and rosy as a young girl is fresh
and rosy at eighteen, blond and slender, with blue eyes, Cesarine seemed
to the young artist a picture of the elasticity, so rare in Paris, that
fills and rounds the delicate cheek, and tints with the color adored of
painters, the tracery of blue veins throbbing beneath the whiteness
of her clear skin. Though she lived in the lymphatic atmosphere of a
Parisian shop, where the air stagnates and the sun seldom shines, her
habits gave her the same advantage