He answered, still following up his idea: “Oh! you will marry now. You will marry some prince, a ruined one, and we shall scarcely see one another.”
She exclaimed, frankly: “Oh! no, not yet. I want someone who pleases me, who pleases me a great deal, who pleases me altogether. I am rich enough for two.”
He smiled with a haughty and ironical smile, and began to point out to her people that were passing, very noble folk who had sold their rusty titles to the daughters of financiers like herself, and who now lived with or away from their wives, but free, impudent, known, and respected. He concluded with: “I will not give you six months before you are caught with that same bait. You will be a marchioness, a duchess or a princess, and will look down on me from a very great height, miss.”
She grew indignant, tapped him on the arm with her fan, and vowed that she would marry according to the dictates of her heart.
He sneered: “We shall see about all that, you are too rich.”
She remarked: “But you, too, have come in for an inheritance.”
He uttered in a tone of contempt: “Oh! not worth speaking about. Scarcely twenty thousand francs a year, not much in these days.”
“But your wife has also inherited.”
“Yes. A million between us. Forty thousand francs’ income. We cannot even keep a carriage on it.”
They had reached the last of the reception-rooms, and before them lay the conservatory—a huge winter garden full of tall, tropical trees, sheltering clumps of rare flowers. Penetrating beneath this somber greenery, through which the light streamed like a flood of silver, they