She looked at him with her clear eyes: "Why, pray?"
"Oh! it is not to pay you insipid compliments in the Italian fashion. It is to speak to you as a friend—as a very devoted friend, who owes you good advice."
"Tell me what it is."
He took up the subject in a roundabout style, dwelt upon his own experience, and upon her inexperience, so as to lead gradually by discreet but explicit phrases to a reference to those adventurers who are everywhere going in quest of fortune, taking advantage with their professional skill of every ingenuous and good-natured being, man or woman, whose purses or hearts they explored.
She turned rather pale as she listened to him.
Then she said: "I understand and I don't understand. You are speaking of some one—of whom?"
"I am speaking of Doctor Mazelli."
Then, she lowered her eyes, and remained a few seconds without replying; after this, in a hesitating voice: "You are so frank that I will be the same with you. Since—since my sister's marriage has been arranged, I have become a little less—a little less stupid! Well, I had already suspected what you tell me—and I used to feel amused of my own accord at seeing him coming."
She raised her face to his as she spoke, and in her smile, in her arch look, in her little retroussé nose, in the moist and glittering brilliancy of her teeth which showed themselves between her lips, so much open-hearted gracefulness, sly gaiety, and charming frolicsomeness appeared that Bretigny felt himself drawn toward her by one of those tumultuous transports which flung him distracted with passion at the feet of the woman who was his latest love. And his heart exulted with joy because Mazelli had not been preferred to him. So then he had triumphed.
He asked: "You do not love him, then?"