This was thoroughly characteristic. A carriage at two francs to save fifteen cents! She evidently knew where the best things were to be found.
The bread came from the Vienna bakery, and the coffee and dessert from the Palais Royale. Jack listened with a sinking heart. She saw that something was wrong.
“Have I spent too much?” she asked.
“No, I think not,—for one occasion,” he answered, with same hesitation.
“But I have not been extravagant. Look here,” she said, and she showed him a long green book; “in this I mean to keep my accounts. I will show my entries to you after dinner.”
Bélisaire and Madame Weber with her child now entered the room. It was truly delicious to see the airs of condescension with which Ida received them; but her manner was withal so kind that they were soon entirely at their ease.
Bélisaire was somewhat out of spirits, for he saw that his marriage must be indefinitely postponed, as he had lost his “comrade.” Ah, one may well compare the events of this world to the see-saws arranged by children, which lifts one of the players, while the other at the same time feels all the hardness of the earth below. Jack mounted toward the light, while his companion descended toward the implacable reality. To begin with, the person called Bélisaire—who should in reality have been named Resignation, Devotion, or Patience—was now obliged to relinquish his pleasant room and sleep in a closet, the only place on that floor; not for worlds would he have gone farther from Madame Weber.
Their guests gone, and Jack and his mother alone, she was astonished to see him bring out a pile of books.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“I am going to study.” And he then told her of the double life he led; of his hopes, and the reward that was held out to him at the end. Until then he had never confided them to her, fearing that she would inform D’Argenton, whom he utterly distrusted, and he feared that in some way his happiness would be compromised. But now that his mother belonged to him alone, he could speak to her of Cécile and of his supreme joy. Jack talked with enthusiasm of his love, but soon saw that his mother did not understand him. She had a certain amount of sentiment, but love had not the same signification for her that it had for him. She listened to him with the same interest that she would have felt in the third act at the Gymnase, when the Ingenue in a white dress, with rose-colored ribbons, listened to the declaration of a lover with frizzed hair. She was pleased with the spectacle as presented by her son, and said two or three times, “How nice! how very nice! It makes me think of Paul and Virginia!”