“Surely, if you’ll only be so yourself. Putting the case at the worst, moreover, who’s to know he’s her bookbinder? It’s the last thing you’d take him for.”
“Yes, for that she chose him carefully,” the old woman murmured, still with a ruffled eyebrow.
“She chose him? It was I who chose him, dear lady!” the Captain cried with a laugh that showed how little he shared her solicitude.
“Yes, I had forgotten. At the theatre,” said Madame Grandoni, gazing at him as if her ideas were confused, yet as if a certain repulsion from her interlocutor nevertheless disengaged itself. “It was a fine turn you did him there, poor young man!”
“Certainly he’ll have to be sacrificed. But why was I bound to consider him so much? Haven’t I been sacrificed myself?”
“Oh if he bears it like you!”—and she almost snorted with derision.
“How do you know how I bear it? One does what one can,” said the Captain while he settled his shirt-front. “At any rate remember this: she won’t tell people who he is for his own sake, and he won’t tell them for hers. So, as he looks much more like a poet or a pianist or a painter, there won’t be that sensation you fear.”
“Even so it’s bad enough,” said Madame Grandoni. “And he’s capable of bringing it out suddenly himself.”
“Ah if he doesn’t mind it she won’t! But that’s his affair.”
“It’s too terrible to spoil him for his station,” the old lady went on. “How can he ever go back?”