but not as regards intelligence and prospects. He will be a deputy and a minister.”
Madame Walter declared, with savage energy: “I will never allow him to marry Susan. You understand—never.”
He ended by getting angry and taking up, as a practical man, the cudgels on behalf of Pretty-boy. “Hold your tongue,” said he. “I tell you again that it must be so; it absolutely must. And who knows? Perhaps we shall not regret it. With men of that stamp one never knows what may happen. You saw how he overthrew in three articles that fool of a Laroche-Mathieu, and how he did it with dignity, which was infernally difficult in his position as the husband. At all events, we shall see. It always comes to this, that we are nailed. We cannot get out of it.”
She felt a longing to scream, to roll on the ground, to tear her hair out. She said at length, in exasperated tones: “He shall not have her. I won’t have it.”