don’t pay us. Moreover, the settling of the estate is not yet done; we shall have the money later on. But today, for want of three thousand francs, we are to be sold up. It is to be at once, this very moment, and, counting upon your friendship, I have come to you.”
“Ah!” thought Rodolphe, turning very pale, “that was what she came for.” At last he said with a calm air—
“Dear madame, I have not got them.”
He did not lie. If he had had them, he would, no doubt, have given them, although it is generally disagreeable to do such fine things: a demand for money being, of all the winds that blow upon love, the coldest and most destructive.
First she looked at him for some moments.
“You have not got them!” she repeated several times. “You have not got them! I ought to have spared myself this last shame. You never loved me. You are no better than the others.”
She was betraying, ruining herself.
Rodolphe interrupted her, declaring he was “hard up” himself.
“Ah! I pity you,” said Emma. “Yes—very much.”
And fixing her eyes upon an embossed carabine, that shone against its panoply, “But when one is so poor one doesn’t have silver on the butt of one’s gun. One doesn’t buy a clock inlaid with tortoise shell,” she went on, pointing to a buhl timepiece, “nor silver-gilt whistles for one’s whips,” and she touched them, “nor charms for one’s watch. Oh, he wants for nothing! even to a liqueur-stand in his room! For you love yourself; you live well. You have a château, farms, woods; you go hunting; you travel to Paris. Why, if it were but that,” she cried, taking up two