“He seems to me an ass!” he replied, unable to control himself.
“A coxcomb,—no?”
“An ass!” repeated Julião. “Such manners, such affectation, such airs, his eyes fixed on his stockings,—very ridiculous ones, in truth, like those of a woman! I showed him my boots without hesitation,—these very ones,” he added, displaying to Sebastião’s view his unpolished boots. “I take pride in them; they are the boots of a man who works.”
Julião was accustomed to boast in public of a poverty that in secret humiliated him not a little. He sipped his sherbet, and added,—
“He is a fool!”
“Did you know he was at one time engaged to Luiza?” said Sebastião in a low voice, frightened at the importance of his disclosure. “Yes,” he added, in response to Julião’s astonished glance. “Hardly any one knows it, not even Jorge; but I heard it a short time since. They were on the point of being married; but his father died, he went away to Brazil, and wrote from there breaking off the engagement.”
Julião smiled, leaning his head back against the wall.
“But this is the story of Eugénie Grandet,” he said; “you are telling me one of Balzac’s romances.”
Sebastião looked at him in astonishment.
“One cannot speak seriously to you,” he said; “I tell you, on my honor, that it is true.”