“Do you think so?”
“Yes, indeed; and he looks like a man who enjoys life, too.”
What strange craving impelled him on a sudden to tell this tavern-wench about Jean’s legacy? Why should this thing, which he kept at arm’s length when he was alone, which he drove from him for fear of the torment it brought upon his soul, rise to his lips at this moment? And why did he allow it to overflow them as if he needed once more to empty out his heart to some one, gorged as it was with bitterness?
He crossed his legs and said:
“He has wonderful luck, that brother of mine. He had just come into a legacy of twenty thousand francs a year.”
She opened those covetous blue eyes of hers very wide.
“Oh! and who left him that? His grandmother or his aunt?”
“No. An old friend of my parents’.”
“Only a friend! Impossible! And you—did he leave you nothing?”
“No. I knew him very slightly.”