enalty. And
what was it but abdication to receive David?

But if Lucien did not see these aspects of the question, his
aristocratic instinct discerned plenty of difficulties of another kind,
and he took alarm. A fine manner is not the invariable outcome of
noble feeling; and while no man at court had a nobler air than Racine,
Corneille looked very much like a cattle-dealer, and Descartes might
have been taken for an honest Dutch merchant; and visitors to La Brede,
meeting Montesquieu in a cotton nightcap, carrying a rake over his
shoulder, mistook him for a gardener. A knowledge of the world, when
it is not sucked in with mother's milk and part of the inheritance of
descent, is only acquired by education, supplemented by certain gifts of
chance--a graceful figure, distinction of feature, a certain ring in the
voice. All these, so important trifles, David lacked, while Nature had
bestowed them upon his friend. Of gentle blood on the mother's side,
Lucien was a Frank, even down to the high-arched instep. David had
inherited the physique of his father the pressman and the flat foot of
the Gael. Lucien could hear the shower of jokes at David's expense; he
could see Mme. de Bargeton's repressed smile; and at length, without
being exactly ashamed of his brother, he made up his mind to disregard
his first impulse and to think twice before yielding to it in future.

So, after the hour of poetry and self-sacrifice, after the reading of
verse that opened out before the friends the fields of literature in the
light of a newly-risen sun, the hour of worldly wisdom and of scheming
struck for Lucien.

Down once more in L'Houmeau he wished that he had not written that
letter; he wished he could have it back again; for down the vista of
the future he caught a glimpse of the inexorable laws of the world. He
guessed that nothing succeeds like success, and it cost him something to
step down from the first rung of the scaling ladder by which he meant to
reach and storm the heights above. Pictures of his quiet and simple life
rose before him, pictures fair with the brightest colors of blossoming
love. There was David; what a genius David had--David who had helped him
so generously, and would die for him at need; he thought of his mother,
of how great a lady she was in her lowly lot, and how she thought that
he was as good as he was clever; then of his sister so gracious in
submission to her fate, of his own innocent childhood and conscien