Then he handed the baby to her mother, and started to go. But Simmons suddenly and unexpectedly turned into Zozo, and insisted on casting his benefactor’s horoscope. His benefactor told him the day of his birth, and guessed at the hour. Zozo figured on a slate, drawing astronomical characters very neatly indeed, and at last began to read off the meaning of his stellar stenography, in a hushed, important voice.
He told Brant everything that had happened to him, (only none of it had happened; but Brant did not say him nay.) Then he told him various things that were to happen to him; and Zozo cheered up greatly when his impassive and sleepy guest sighed as he spoke of a blonde woman who was troubling his heart, and who would be his, some day. There was a blonde woman troubling Brant’s heart; but there was small probability of her being his some day or any day. And then Zozo went on to talk about a dark woman who would disturb the course of true love; but only temporarily and as a side issue, so to speak.
“She ain’t serious,” he said. “She may make a muss; but she ain’t reel serious.”
“Good night!” said Brant.
“You don’t b’lieve in the Science,” said Zozo, in a voice of genuine regret. “But you jist see if it don’t come true. Good night. Look out you don’t trip over the scraper.”
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The blonde woman in Mr. Brant’s case was Madame la Comtesse de Renette. No, she was not a French woman: she was a loyal American. She was the daughter of an American millionaire; she had lived for many years in France, and her parents had married her, at the age of eighteen, to a title. The title was owned by a disagreeable and highly immoral old spendthrift, who had led her a wretched life for two weary years, and then had had the unusual courtesy and consideration to die. Then she took what he had left of her millions, went home to the town of her birth, bought a fine estate on its outskirts, and settled down to enjoy a life wherein she could awake each morning to feel that the days would never more bring her suffering and humiliation.
Then Mr. Richard Brant disturbed her peace of mind by falling in love with her, and what was worse, asking her to marry him. That, she said, she could not do. He was her best, her dearest friend: she admired and esteemed him more than any man in the world. If she ever could marry a man, she would marry him. But she never, never could. He must not ask her.
Of course, he did ask her. And he asked her more than once. And there matters stood, and there they seemed likely to stay.
But Richard Brant was a man who, when he wanted a thing, wanted it with his whole heart and his whole soul, and to the exclusion of every other idea from his mind. After eighteen months of waiting, he began to find the situation intolerable. He had no heart in his business—which, for the matter of that, took care of itself—and he found it, as he said to himself, “a chore to exist.” And what with dwelling on the unattainable, and what with calling on the unattainable once or twice every week, he found that he was getting into a morbid state of mind that was the next thing to a mild mania.