"Yes, yes."
"Is he tall and thin, with a beautiful figure, and quite a fashionable, gentlemanly sort of air,—wonderfully so, considering he is but a clerk? Now, then, does your M. Rodolph answer to that description?"
"Perfectly," answered Fleur-de-Marie; "and I feel quite sure that we both mean the same. The only thing that puzzles me is your fancying he is a clerk."
"Oh, but I know he is. He told me so himself."
"And you know him intimately?"
"Why, he is my next-door neighbour."
"M. Rodolph is?"
"I mean next-room neighbour; because he occupies an apartment on the fourth floor, next to mine."
"He—M. Rodolph—lodges in the next room to you?"
"Why, yes. But what do you find so astonishing in a thing as simple as that? He only earns about fifteen or eighteen hundred francs a year, and, of course, he could not afford a more expensive lodging,—though, certainly, he does not strike me as being a very careful or economical person; for, bless his dear heart, he actually does not know the price of the clothes he wears."